


Desert of Ghosts

by rednightmare



Category: Vampire: The Masquerade, Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines (Video Game), World of Darkness (Games)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Assassination Plot(s), Assimilation v Divergence, Blackmail, Camarilla v Anarchs, Capitalism & Communism & Colonialism, Class Struggle, Enemies to MORE ENEMIES, Gen, HEAVY INTRIGUE, Misinformation Campaigns, Sabbat v Everybody, Social Issues, Unreliable Narrator, Vampire Politics, Ventrue v Brujah
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-09
Updated: 2017-11-01
Packaged: 2019-01-15 03:58:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 95
Words: 355,853
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12313323
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rednightmare/pseuds/rednightmare
Summary: VTMB Jyhad AU. Hero-free, multi-POV, big fat Bloodlines redux. Loose souls can’t let go of their low-down LA dreams.





	1. Fire Dogs

**Author's Note:**

> **FLYBY RUNDOWN** : _Desert of Ghosts_ is a messy _Vampire: the Masquerade – Bloodlines_ remix with no player-character to save the day. It prioritizes vampiric faction conflict for LA rather than the quest for the Ankaran Sarcophagus. Some heavy world changes inside.
> 
> **CONTENT WARNINGS AND DISCLAIMERS** :  
>  This story isn’t intended as an expansion, restorative work, or a writing critique of _Bloodlines_ ; it’s just a wacky shake-up of something I love for fun. It’s also not an endeavor to rewrite _Bloodlines_ as a morality play or serve as an emotional fix-it fic. (Nothing against fix-its; just know that this isn’t one!) 
> 
> 1\. ADULT CONTENT: _Desert of Ghosts_ is written in an assortment of close third-person POVs. Some characters in this work are sexist, racist, classist, ethnocentric, evil little dipshits. The narrative existence of these negative themes, shitty worldviews, and bad ideas is an attempt at rendering believable character psych profiles and acknowledging contemporary socio-political situations (especially in the United States); it isn’t an endorsement. 
> 
> For your psych wellness, a list of potential major triggers follows:  
>  a. Graphic (described in scene): homicide; physical assault; terroristic acts; abduction (of adults); mass shooting; blood, bones & gore; animal attack; explosives; torture (of adults). There is a lot of violence and character death in _Desert of Ghosts_ , but there are no rape scenes.  
>  b. References (mentioned in brief passing, but not described in-scene): substance abuse; sexual abuse; human trafficking; suicide; domestic abuse.
> 
> 2\. CANON. For the love of cheddar-loaded baked potatoes, please don’t use _Desert of Ghosts_ as a handbook to canon. This story respects major elements of VtM lore, but with tweaks and omissions—some minor personal taste details, some significant clanbook alterations. If you have questions about what is and is not canon, please consult official resources, or send me a private message.
> 
> \--o--O--O--o-- 
> 
> **NOTES ON VERSION 2 FOR RETURNING READERS** : _Desert of Ghosts_ is _Byzantine Black_ if _Byzantine Black_ was your high school crush at the 10-year-reunion. You thought he’d be a scrub forever… and OK, he still kind of is, but he’s a scrub you might let touch your butt, if Hozier was blasting and you watched him wash his hands first. 
> 
> That but serious: I rewrote _Byzantine Black_. Line-by-line. The whole thing. There are several reasons why I feel this was necessary, but they mainly boil down to these four: 
> 
> 1\. I wanted friendlier syntax, better dialogue, and snazzier voices.  
>  2\. I’m creatively better-researched, and thereby able to air new content and retooled characterizations I previously shied away from.  
>  3\. I was never happy with the ending, and  
>  4\. Some of it was SO embarrassing. I was a teenager trying to get into college when I wrote most of the original draft; now I teach at college. Super weird to measure your life progress in effing _fanfiction_ , but in a literal sense: I grew up. 
> 
> Granted, there’s cutting to be done, lazy prose to overhaul, and typos to be busted, but I’m at the point where I feel more or less comfortable re-releasing. 
> 
> **WHERE’S THE END?** : It’s being completely redone! There will be a new series of ending events to replace the old chapters; you may recognize some scenes, but the vast majority will be rewritten, replotted, and expanded. I’ll be finishing and uploading this new ending serially, chapter-by-chapter. This gives you the opportunity to enjoy that episodic new content feel again, if that’s your thing. If it’s not, you might want to check back with this story later.
> 
> That’s it for now. Thanks for everything you did and do! Hugs, everybody. 
> 
> (Except for you, Vandal. No hugs for you. Too dangerous.)  
>  -rn

Here's a story for you:

In the City of Angels, a rich white man is born grown. Blue-eyed and blond-headed, he comes into second life—a sharpening of his first life, if you please. A new, better, sleeker life, one with all the baby fat scraped off. He comes equipped with everything a rich white man needs. Got good bones, nice front teeth, a loft with a waterbed and a chandelier; he has stock options; he has Italian cuts and a sponsor with heavy pockets; do you understand, he has stock options; he has accumulated interest; he has a big bureau car in passionless, bad mother black. He is born-again like a Baptist is. This Aryan prince, whose name is not important right now, is what other rich white men like to call a _go-getter_. He is starting off pretty high and is upwardly mobile. He is young people. He is on the way up.

So this moving-up man lands flat-footed in boomtown LA. Time to paint a picture of him—because you'd be smart to recognize a man like this, wouldn't you, now.

He is:

Suave, symmetrical, clean-cut, gelled-up, a smooth fucking operator with a Cloroxed grin and a hungry shine. He smells the blood in the water first. He is button-down violence with some hip red cufflinks. Man, if you catch his attention, this kid will never let you go. He will dog you like a fool. He is Nordic; has some Viking in him, somewhere back there. He knows how to crack the whip and how to duck his head and row. He is _cool_. He has never not had a gym membership. He is made of long, weedy muscle; tall calves, thin legs; probably does pull-ups on the closet beam before bed, with the off-blacks of his dry cleaning hanging behind him. Probably played tennis in college; probably did college at Northwestern or Vanderbilt; not quite smart enough for Harvard, not quite sharp enough for Stanford, not dreamy enough for Yale. Of course he is a little bit baby-faced. He stands from the soles of his shoes to that famous gold-blond somewhere between five foot eight-to-ten. He's about, oh, yea high.

He's a Mr. Big Man, our guy. He does not let little things get him down.

Watch him. He leaves his apartment looking like a champ. He takes the stairs at a canter when the elevator's too slow. He busts through those lobby doors like The Angels are waiting on him – strides out of Skyeline, briefcase and fancy watch, sports coat neat and scary, shoulders trying to seem broader than they are. He's got an Ivy Leaguer's belligerent clip, and that blasé, top-down skip-hop of the National Young Republicans. He's across the street and into the parking lot. His tie knots could probably break some little girl or little boy's heart.

This is how a big man walks.

He showed up three months ago like he belongs here. Where doesn't a rich white man belong, you might ask—good-looking kid like him, popular opinions, fresh out of that MBA? He's here to get big, ain't he? Los Angeles is big-time for big people—big as a boomtown gets. It's Gold Rush territory. It is Not The Sixties Anymore. It has American dreams, this place. It has palm trees and orange juice and film options and giant, red trees and it has massive towers and sharp corners and country suckers and mean fuckers who will hold you down and brick you if they can; it has men who only deal in six figures and who are looking for bloodthirsty partners all the time; and kid, it has women, not just the people but the but the idea: salad women and sexy women and loose women and serious, capitalist, break-your-bank, put-you-down, buy-you-out women and all kinds of women a big man like this wants to meet. He calls everybody back, always. He sees no reason why we can't all be pals here. He says wait a minute, don't come to me, I'll come to you, because that's the swell kind of guy I am. This is how a big man gets in.

Things starting to blend together now? Starting to look like these big guys are all alike? Darlin, it is a goddamn sea of bluebloods out there, and easy to lose sight of our principal character. He's really just middle-management. He's a trooper, our guy—somebody who carries a rifle and a company badge and honks _yessir_! He came into this thing on accident, tell the truth, but he was given great clemency. He now calls himself a _self-made man_.

Keep your eye on the ball, here. After all, we're still talking about just one person—a boy with ambitions, a bratty name, and a nasty red tie. Kid, believe it or not: we are not talking about Prince LaCroix.

Except that we are, in a way, because—you peel back the armor and the million-dollar grin—you'll find that snakes, inside, are all the same.

Our snake of the night rolls into Angeltown like plenty of them have rolled in before. He is made for that platinum member gold card A-list and he expects to be listened-to. He says honey, I'm home.

But honey, there's a problem. There were some pretty big people already here.

LA has a history of building up and burning down. It's riots, riots, riots. Big people chew on the little people until one of those little people has had enough, finds some of their own teeth, and learns how to chew meat, too. All things in time, obviously. You start out eating little snakes. Baby snakes, here-n-there, and then you move on to small snakes. You eat enough of those, you feel yourself expand; you begin hunting bigger reptiles; you get immune to the poison; you start salivating when you see the middle-management. You know how to handle serpents like these. You chase them down and flatten them out and stomp their heads. You rip them skinless and open their flesh. You get their tender, fatty hearts in your hands and like striking oil you wring the black out of them. You catch these snakes by the throat, and you choke them before they can even think about biting-back, and you squeeze.

You get a little bigger and a little spookier every time. You get meaner and meaner, until some of those big man snakes don't look so big to you anymore.

But come on, now – who wouldn't like our guy? He's eager to please. He's raring to go. He's got business to do and doesn't take anything personal, so it's hard for his people to imagine why any lowdown dog out there would want to do their little joint-stock thing harm. But say-it-ain't-so: he has detractors. He has a shortlist of people this big-man-boy has whacked to get where he is today.

He has made what you might call enemies.

He has got the wrong kind of eyes watching him now.

Watch him, walking around like nobody has ever wanted to roar the engine and run his skeleton down.

The thing about big men, honey, is that they get so puffed up on can-do, just-watch-me attitude, they can't see much else. So maybe that's the special issue, here. That's the species difference. A man like this, rich and white and college-degreed, can't even tell he's jaywalked into someone else's city, pissed everybody off. He has no real memory of drowning their children, stepping on their toes. What's a couple executions and a city or two between wholesome lawmakers like us, buddy? He's already swept the baby's bones under the rug. He lands his feet on the shore and he catches a whiff of that Gold Rush possibility and he starts dropping orders everywhichway. They're governors, these guys. They set up fences and tell other people what to do.

This is how a big man grows.

So this skeezy little fuck squeaks into LA, like he has some kind of right to—like a young Columbus, hitting an island and ramming down the empire's flag—like the divine visitor—and what eventually happens to white men who "discover" other people's land is bound to put a wrinkle in his Five Point Plan. This kid is delusional. This piece of shit thinks he can slide right in under the radar, him and the whole damn grand armada, prop up and take over another monster's domain. That's what they do, these limp-wrist cross-eyed trust fund baby Ventrue fuckers. This is how a big man moves in.

Watch him cross the street: springs over the curb, glances only one way, does not pause. Cars don't hurt me; bullets don't hurt me; the Brujah don't hurt me; nothing does. Watch the brand new plastic-capped laces of his narrow shoes bounce. He has got to punch-in and punch-out. If you were, say, waiting in your truck just down the block, your visors down, your windows rolled-up, your jacket hood pulled forward stakeout style, a knapsack full of buckshot and matches and wine bottles full of excess astrolite in your passenger side, you'd notice how this measly son-of-a-bitch moves from the places he's been toward the places he wants to go.

Watch him work: the kid has a prerogative to do what he's asked. He's a cleaner, himself—he hup-twos over fences, drags in defaulters, slaps 'em for contempt of court. He thinks that makes him important. He's heavy-footed on the gas and double-checks his collar crispness in his cell phone camera before kicking in a door. Worthless junior bottom-feeder thinks he's trying out for a big bad seat on the Scourge. He adds assassinations to his résumé instead of notches in a bedpost.

Most recently, this fuckwit Scepter-Childe barreled straight over the border, hot-in-pursuit, way out into Long Beach for a last-minute kill. But Mr. Big Man Kiddo knocked the wrong heads together that time. He snuffed a couple pretty good kids—kids who, unfortunately for our guy, were also Anarch soldiers. They belonged to one of Smiling Jack's fixers up in San Fran—some foxy, shades-wearing weirdo with a real Greek name and a thing for Puerto Rican boys. (Never could figure out what she was doing with Jack.) She had a mean ass break-action and some bones to pick. She had Nines Rodriguez's number. She had half a doomsday arsenal leftover from the Kuei-jin siege, just rotting out in a desert cave somewhere—and, for one small favor, she was willing to send a cut to her friendly neighbor downstate.

Watch his place: Skyeline Apartments is full of small-time jewelry thieves, aspiring socialites and, of course, a couple no-good Camarilla do-boys like these. It's got art prints and leather couches. It's got talent hunters and Late Night hacks. It's got this no-count little shit living in a patron-paid flat on floor four—wide-screen TV, shotguns in his closet, angel fishes in a tank. He spends his company paychecks like a sailor. He picks up springbreakers and dumps them in the lobby to sleep it off. Gringo keeps a six-shot pistol in a cigar box like a cutie-pie. Thinks he's a gangster, this slick sack of shit. Thinks he's a prettyboy, a Mack the Knife. He won't look over his shoulder. He has a brand new plaque on his mailbox latch.

Even his name tastes despicable: _Victor de Luca._ Shit like that kind of makes you want to spit.

He gives people work to do.

And you better believe it: they've worked all night, The People—worked through sunrise, squinting and plotting and smarting off at each other and never ever resting their heads. Everybody wanted a piece of this job. Everybody wants to get a crack at the magic orphan, take a swing at the pet project of a Prince. So, like true-blue comunistas, they divide the labor equally. Damsel found the address. K-Al secured the supplies. Skelter built the package. Nobody got any sleep that morning, honey, but how can a good insurgent sleep when there's so much to get done? This is the work of redistribution, child. There was still a tangle of copper wire, rolls of duct tape, and a rash of gasoline stain on the basement floor. Only thing left was for somebody to plant it. Only thing left to be done was to sit back, wait a spell, and watch for the boom.

Watch this:

Our guy actually makes it across Dewap Road. He's up an incline and onto the lot and he does not even check the cars around him. Who'd have it out for me, he figures. He's the Prince's new deputy, Lackey Numero Uno. Bitchboy thinks he's untouchable. Checks himself out in rearview mirrors and storefronts and Coke bottles—unkillable, this guy. Probably folds his tighty whities. Probably looks in the mirror and dares his reflection _are you talkin to me_? It's funny for you, maybe, because that's exactly the size of neck you could grab in your palm and break open. Take the back of his skull and put it through the side of a bus. Smash into glass until the smirk crunches. Wrench off his arms and drive nails in his eyes and tear the forked tongue out, make him swallow that wicked part of himself, so a snake maybe comprehends the outrage of what it has done to the world again and again and again.

But who're we kidding, here. Snakes may do the math, but honey, they do not learn.

This is how a big man gets caught in a lie:

The Ventrue lose their _minds_ if you get them cornered. They hit their kneecaps and squeal _wahh!_ when all that karma creeps up. They play dumb when you start dropping names of the dead. They hit the high notes when you show the machete in your sleeve. They crank on the water works. They won't pipe the fuck down. They got the eye of your pistol gouging a dent in the space between their eyes and they try to speak what they guess is your language. They ay dios de mio but think of The People you. And you say I'm sorry, but what did you suppose was going to happen here, buttercup? It's natural order. Ventrue don't know how to bow out and die on their feet. They'll be sweetening you up and scrambling to crook you until you scatter their brain on a corner of the darkwood desk.

This is what a big man tries.

Watch him get in his car. This is a kid that saddles up and rides to war in a Pontiac, babychild. He is a G8 kind of kid with a scratch-proof polish. He stops for no-body. There's doors to open, do you understand? Doors to open. He has deals to seal and rings to kiss and other fish to fry.

He puts his briefcase neatly on the hood, pats the phone in his breast pocket, palms over his hair part, checks the time.

This is how a big man lets fly.

He gets his keys from the keyhole and his hand on the handle and he opens the driver's side door.

Boom town.

Nines Rodriguez drums his fingers on the steering wheel and lets that snakey kind of smile find his own teeth. And for his own sake he says:

_boom_

Gone.

The car lights up. It is toast. It pops and smokes and throws up some red in that star-bitten gold rush sky.

In the City of Angels, this is how a big man dies.

* * *

 

**DESERT OF GHOSTS**

Like firedogs in the wind.

_Plath_


	2. Five and Twenty

A million stories start like:

Once upon a time, there was a soldier.

Which makes our particular soldier one of a million just like her. But this story doesn't mean it that way; what this story means, when it says one-in-a-million, is that war is a mechanism of replaceable parts, and she is just one of those parts, armed up and pulled off the rack to replace some other soldier who isn't anymore.

She does not have a special title or a friendly name. You could call her **—** what's the word **—** expendable. Everyone else usually just calls her

 _Miss_.

Ms. Woeburne startled up, airline magazine catching the nylon on her knees.

"Sorry to bother you, ma'am," the attendant hushed, wincing polite, tired eyes. He'd changed the "miss" to "ma'am" in the space it took for her to twist her head and look. "But you'll have to tuck that bag completely beneath the seat before landing. Just a safety precaution, is all."

4A blinked at him. She had the hollow expression of dark-time flyers, the small itches and twitches under a smart black suit.

"Yes, right. Sorry," she cut, lunging forward to manhandle the knapsack into an acceptable place. Our soldier speaks worried, prickly English; the words are precise, but the accent snaps its fingers, slightly imperfect, the stamp of a multi-national. It's a terse and uncompromising mezzo soprano. Butterflies tightened the round, short face.

She wore suits. She had clipped, square nails on blunt, busy hands. She moved one to quiet nonexistent wrinkles in her sober blazer, touching protectively at the severe brown bob-cut she wore. It'd been nice once, spit-shine pretty, and so had she, but flying has a way of fixing prettiness.

"We usually check luggage of that size, ma'am." He pointed with his thumb. "They oughtn't have let you past checking with it."

4A blinked some more behind grim wire glasses. Her eyes were the sea-brine color of jarred olives and somehow unkind.

"I have a claims ticket. Here. It's right here."

"Still, a large bag. It really shouldn't be a carry-on."

"Well," she said.

The neatly-snipped head of brunette curled at its edges, bookending a narrow chin, where too much blush smeared her shallow malars. Purple tried to etch disciplinarian angles into baby cheeks. It tried to seem angry—all of it—but she was only nerves. "Well, there's nothing to be done about it now. Aren't I past the point of no return, here. Aren't I just a little bit too late."

"I can see you're preoccupied. I hate to pester you, but I do have to follow regulations." The attendant was grinning sheepishly now, arm braced on the seat back, watching 4A attempt to wedge her parcel into a smaller shape than it was. "Can you fit it under? I'd be happy to help you stow it in the overhead."

"No. That's **—** just give me a **—** won't be necessary." Rigid elbows, partridge bones and a forced, squint-eyed smile. It was cold and perfunctory. Small, sterile teeth flashed in a dark mouth. She pressed down one short pump heel and gave it a stubborn shove. "Thank you. I've got it under control."

"That will be fine, ma'am; you're all right there. I'd comp you a drink if I wouldn't get my knuckles rapped for it." He winked, palm popping the upholstery, a little theatrical by design.

"Well." Her eyelids crinkled, almost precious, in a sullen, paralegal sort of way. "You'll leave now, won't you."

Then there was a bump. Harmless turbulence—and then he was leaving, somehow. There were a hundred other people on this plane. He said enjoy the rest of your flight. He went.

Ms. Woeburne's smile evaporated the moment he turned, and she watched that checkered, ridiculous shirt clip down Flight 584's centeraisle.

Our soldier pushed her garbage magazine into a holster and leant backwards, desperate for distraction, not wanting to talk. It was difficult to be bouncy about the whole thing. There was an annoying, pink-eyed rush from the vents; plastics rattled everywhere; cushion leather rumpled through tweed and pantyhose. She'd checked her wristwatch at least two dozen times since the descent announcement. Two dozen, yes, because Ms. Woeburne always takes great care. The Clan does not like slouching, let alone poor preparations, and she was a _prodigious_ preparer, even among the five and twenty others milling around in this army—all metal parts, clean and durable, ready to jump in and replace a dead captain at the slightest commander's clap-clap.

There was a sun out there, somewhere, rolling in the surf of the world. It disturbed the tops of these clouds, periwinkling them, prelude to a creeping, rainy dawn.

She hated flying. _Hated_ _._ For Ms. Woeburne, hate is not too strong a sensation and it is not too strong a word. She felt like a mouse in a cheese can. Everything about this destination made fight-or-flight start to itch.

Lord knew Ms. Woeburne had enough fighting scheduled to keep her itching for the next forever.

There was an unwelcome taste in the Foreman's mouth. She tugged her sleeves and checked the itinerary again. A car should be idling down there, through that swirl of listless North American gray. John F. Kennedy Terminal 2, read the paper; her complimentary ride, chauffeured by someone's irritating ghoul, would shuttle Ms. Woeburne to a safe layover point until an outbound for LAX. Just as well. She wasn't going to hurry; not unless she had to. Not to Los Angeles. That city was unknown territory. Flat earth and gunsmoke and smog. New York wasn't exactly home – and perhaps it never had been, really – but unhomely homes are preferable to question marks. Ms. Woeburne was a nervous personality by nature; she did not appreciate questions. And at the moment, sitting here with her slumping hair and her overlarge bag, the Ventrue was full of them: questions of bomb dogs, killed boys, and the two-times-dead. The flight had better land on time.

 _'If it knows what's good for it. I'd be the second one crisped in a forty-eight-hour window.'_ Ms. Woeburne could scarcely wish Mr. LaCroix's reaction to such news upon anyone.

She had not been personally acquainted with Victor de Luca, and knew of the Associate only through background checks her Sire requested four months ago. This was how Ms. Woeburne kept herself privy to most Camarilla business. That is, read it in a file. Found it in a case folder. Shut it in the safe. She was not a numbers person; she _was_ details, check-plusses, and bad figures covered up with a big black marker.

What was her job, exactly? Well, it's multilayered. Usually, she took documentation too sensitive for local channels, censored it feckless, and locked old folders quietly away. They would come in the post with one inscription: _For S.W._ And surely as LaCroix Foundation kept sending information, she kept processing **—** one thousand documents, classified and ugly, dated, banished in the darkest recesses where a Prince need not remember them anymore. Ms. Woeburne had no context to profit from them, you see, so she was a good person to trust. She had no connections in LA, so she was Good People.

She was a transcript doctor, to be blunt about it. She scratched out and rewrote and redacted the hell out of everything they snuck to her desk. She was 1984.

But Ms. Woeburne preferred not to think of herself as a malfeasance-scrubber, washing away political crimes and bracketing perjury at some shabby office in the Ministry of Truth. Besides, that was only part of her trade. The rest of the time, she was a house bailiff, if you will—chief extension of her Sire's arm. She oversaw the Hendon estate. She handled accounts. She slammed the door on Harpies (she wasn't scared of Harpies). She was bound by blood and an impressive contract; she did not read into rumors too much. And honestly, the reading rarely crossed her mind. There was no reason to rally attention to a curt, competent, bureaucratic corporal, who stamped requests and put her signature in meager blue pen.

 _"I'll take a summer off,"_ she kept telling herself. It was a nice thought. It was also a lie.

Do you know, it's actually kind of an honor, when you think about it in the right frame of mind. If you thought about it the right way, you might, like her, come to savor those red-stamped manila envelopes arriving at the door. Why not. There were a hundred candidates clambering for this job, people with hotter ambition and pokier skills, but who got it? Hm? Who ended up with the pigskin and the badge?

It was not precisely how she'd pictured being a monster's acquisition. It was not like it had been, waking decades ago with bandaged arms and a toothy echo in her stomach. But she'd become dependent upon it. She learned to require the gingery bolt of tension responsibilities brought, clutching confidential parcels, pressing the address tag tightly to an unbeating chest.

It was still not clear exactly why he'd summoned her away from all that, so suddenly and without much explanation. But you sort of get used to it. Really, though, what else are you going to do.

Ms. Woeburne would not have called herself an agent, though she understood that was the appropriate term.

She had come into the possession of Prince LaCroix in the 1970s, an early co-ed in a Dartmouth graduate exchange. She'd made for an average student. That standoffish memory of a woman largely considered herself too grown-up for hand-raising; work took precedence; work, as a matter-of-fact, in a human resources office of the New England finance company Sebastian kept for public face. She pinched pennies and downed vile espresso inside a studio not far from Manhattan, playing the two words _empty expectations_ on repeat in her head. The Foreman could remember sitting in a drab coffeehouse after office hours, scribbling out a thesis on some art that didn't matter. It had been a gorey takedown on imperialist fetishes in the late verse of Sylvia Plath. She had been, what, a hard sneeze short of thirty years old.

At some fork of her life thirty-year-life, Ms. Woeburne had casually become evil. She must've, because **—** rather than quitting back to Leeds to teach, wed, age then die **—** here she was, sorting through the mediocre paperwork of crime.

And do you know: forty years of this evilness changed little for Ms. Woeburne. Her rapport with Mr. LaCroix remained, for lack of better word, unremarkable; it was polite, impersonal, and steady-goes. And she had never really bothered with friends.

You don't need talent, Woeburne realized. All you need is a sense of discipline, a head on your neck, and a few obvious, practical knowledges. The things you pick up, here-and-there.

She'd had acquired a mildly interesting collection: contract-writing, the most basic language of encryption, tricks to help her serve on a Board. On Sebastian's suggestion, our soldier visited a shooting range every third Saturday toting a polished nine-millimeter. It was currently crammed in her carry-on. She'd gotten rather good with the thing, too. Boredom will do that to one. Ms. Woeburne ached for purpose in those odd free hours; she read and reread old books to fill long evenings. She tucked up her legs on an uncomfortable velvet dustball of couch and clung to classics, listening to even dustier swing, lily vases struggling to be quixotic, a pastiche of some other woman's past life. As a Foreman, she thought it was an appropriate set of hobbies. As Ms. Woeburne, she thought it either existentially romantic or absolutely laughable, depending on her mood.

And as a woman—what was left of one, anyway—she made it a point never to touch that hulking grand piano in the lobby. She had hated piano ever since Noellene first saddled her boarding school luggage with a parcel of parlor room fake books disguised as a departure present.

But yes.

Yes, rarely—and so what?—when AM sunlight lanced off the stainless steel shutters of that pompous, too-maroon Victorian master bedroom Mr. LaCroix had designated to his latest Childe, she tossed in silk sheets and wondered if her mother ever wept for her. If she burned her special occasion candles down to stumps, making the whole flat smell like cinnamon and orange peels and dragon's blood. If she ever made the trip to Lahore she said she'd never care to make, stood under the Minar-e-Pakistan in a drenching rain with her coat sodden and her socks soaked through, and thought _oh, the land of my father! I wish I had brought my child here!_ If she hunted her husband down with the doggedness S.W. had inherited from her to tell him by the way, you miserable limey bastard, that baby you ran from is dead.

All of it maudlin trash. Her mother had been a nasty bit of flint with a crush on ennui and antiquated notions about gender, no one to love once she grew out of it, and no one to stand under a tower in rain. The sad scenes were just byproducts of a daughter's scabby little pride. She knew it was unlikely anyone else noticed Ms. Woeburne the Woman had disappeared.

But! On the whole, Ms. Woeburne the Soldier liked Sebastian much better than she had liked Noellene. And Noellene would've been awfully proud of the job, never mind that she'd been killed for it.

(Life really started smelling like unresolved parental issues in the winter, when Sebastian was in London, and promised he'd treat her to the theater but never found time. Ms. Woeburne was never much for theater, anyway. She would have been a little more amicable to a private jet.)

Make no mistake about her, though. Family love might be dead-as-a-doornail, but envy is mostly alive and well. Despite their detachment, she'd perceived some recent disappointment from her Sire **—** sensed Mr. LaCroix's irritation that he had not gotten to Mr. de Luca first **—** and was jealous. She liked being the only one of her. De Luca and his chilly, aggressive loyalty threatened the prickly single Childe more than she'd admit; his murder relaxed her hackles. To this day, relief is the sharpest thing Ms. Woeburne's felt, as fresh as it was in life, like chugging ice-water after a long jog. Relief is merciful coldness that goes down with a sting.

So much for humanity. Oh, well. Evil, then.

One more sigh, though; she whuffed it, then tucked earthy hair behind both ears, pressing her skull against the dilapidated neck pillow. _'I should do it. This time, really, I should. Once we're done with this mess, I'm going to ask Sebastian for a holiday. Beach blathers on and on and on about how the Left Bank is in May. Maybe it's worth it. Or, hell! Maybe_ I'll _go to Lahore, stand under the tower and cry.'_

Or maybe Los Angeles is somewhere-else enough.

S.W. was just indulging a snide image of vacationing postmortem **—** fanged femme fatale, sipping tea alfresco, daintily adjusting her sun hat **—** when a sudden buck of turbulence whipped the Ventrue's head into upholstery and wrought out an embarrassingly ladylike shriek.

The intercom flipped. Ms. Woeburne became aware of critical eyes. She shrunk into her seat cushions. The adjacent rows had twisted around to glare.

A voice of authority with no meaning and no face over the intercom said: _Welcome to the Big City. We're glad you chose us._

She clicked the buckle at her waist. Teeth tight, cheeks burning, S.W. retracted each claw from the armrests and checked for the time. There it was: the little toe of morning. There it was: an American daybreak, four and thirty-eight o'clock.

There was a time limit. There was a silly, self-indulgent promise: if there wasn't a car waiting by the time her heels hit pavement, there was going to be an angry Ventrue, and there was going to be a driver with a toothmark in his neck.

There was nothing to be done, Ms. Woeburne told herself. There was no use worrying.

Do you know, though, no matter the use and no matter the time: she found there was always something to be worried about.

Your story says there was a soldier, made of tin.


	3. For SW

_For S.W._

_  
_ Your immediate presence is requested in Los Angeles. A Board seat will be vacated in anticipation of your arrival. You will be instated within a week. Preparatory materials enclosed.

Following your placement, you will be expected to provide a report with attached assessment to the local Primogen regarding Victor de Luca’s work history, mapping his standard zone of operation to the best of your abilities. As a geographically and politically removed party—and as the author of Mr. de Luca’s personnel registry file—the responsibility of compiling a comprehensive accounting of his assignments falls to you.

Please see attached.

You need not present this information in-session or deliver a press conference; at this time, I trust thorough documentation will do. I also trust it will reflect the reality that my operative’s orders were unvaryingly legal and respectful of all formally established borders. Pertinent information enclosed.

Some light editing is required.

Be advised that this process may take time. The Primogen will doubtlessly have questions, and I am sure you will address them to satisfaction. Keep in mind that this is not a trial or a debate. It is merely a casual inquest.

As you, of course, know, Board instatement is a formality. During your brief tenure, you may have the opportunity to vote on a motion or two—and you will be guided accordingly should such a possibility come to pass. An informational booklet covering our more visible undertakings will be prepared for you, but I understand this leaves precious little time for review. Obviously, I do not expect you to act as an expert opinion on city affairs.

You will not introduce legislature. You will not be expected to serve as an advisor.

While your report percolates, I will have some other work for you.

Detailed travel itinerary incoming. I look forward to briefing you personally, and hope you are well.

 

Regards,

SL

 

P.S. Do not close any accounts. You won’t be here forever.


	4. Verse

Seven-oh-seven.

The Baron sat up upon his thinning cot. It was a bleak, cool evening, and he was alone.

Rodriguez shook off his sleep in an unhappy hurry and fumbled to kill the alarm. He'd smacked the thing off the bedside, which meant he had to stretch way out and grope for it, if he could make his hands work worth a shit. Noise did this to him. High, like a steam engine, or a storm siren—it stood his fine hairs up, made blood surge around his heart.

The Baron shut off and tossed the clock down, not bothering with the lightswitch. His eyes hurt. A winter sun sank half-hour ago, and with it there came the strange, restless feeling of early nights—nights that stung your face like wind, dried you out like old coals—nights that got everything seeming just a bit scarier. Winter on the desert made the air smell a little like fire.

So he kicked off his sad sheet, got both feet on the floor. Piece-of-shit mattress sat on a cheap, screechy springboard that routinely fucked up his back. Truth is Rodriguez had been meaning to find a new place for months, since right after his last displacement—a move made in two minutes because he saw a weird car on a weird street and got a weird feeling.

He moves every nine or ten weeks. It's more weirdness than anything else this time of year.

Current place was more of a basement than a hideout. You walked straight down eight concrete stairs from the sidewalk, under some wolf spiders, and into his undecorated living room, where you'd only have the flickering TV and a carpetless floor. Shitty color of wood. There was no couch—just a creaky breakfast table, a waterlogged desk he didn't need, two uncomfortable chairs. Rest of that space was empty air scowled in on by peeling, pinstriped green wallpaper—no windows—just the glum corner-kitchen with its cabinets that didn't close tight and its dim buttercream paint. The tiles under his shower and stove had been orange once, but now they were flat adobe. The radiator gathered dust at the end of a stunted, claustrophobic hall. Bathroom was first on the left and the light kept going out. He kept his bedroom door shut.

It's not that Nines didn't have any money, you've got to understand; what he couldn't afford was the time. You can make the other things, but you can't make any time.

You can make a lot of friends in a city like this, too, you're not too squeamish about the particulars. Look for an Anarch business and you'll find other people's orphans out there hustling a buck for the Cause—kids who got nothing but time. Course, it's all baby drugs these days; Rodriguez wasn't a kingpin, but he knew some guys who were. There were a few Culiacán runners leftover from Rochelle's days shipping product to Cali and bussing in illegals when they could for sixty-five-percent profit. Nines was getting ripped off, but you always are in a city; the question is how far you can make that rip-off thirty-five go.

It wasn't enough to ditch Isaac's investment, obviously, but it was a decent something. When Hollywood wouldn't pay its dues, they still had thirty-five-percent of cars, thirty-five-percent of guns, and a thirty-five-percent stockpile of automatics, grenades, and fireworks hidden under the floor in Griffith Park, hooked up to a fuse, waiting for Nines to say _three-two-one_.

Twenty-first century for you. It's easy meat; half of these kids had already been dealing before their Embrace. Easier than the kind it used to be, anyway, when he was one of those kids—when the meat didn't always come in crates or in plastic—but more often in longcoats, work visas, and imitation pearl.

Rodriguez spent next to zero time in a house, anyway. He didn't bring people here. He didn't want anybody to know here he slept. The landlord—some speedy, skull-capped gecko of a guy—would invariably come pecking at the doors, but usually left rent-collecting to his ma, who used kindergarten English and only when she absolutely had to. _Pagué el lunes_ and _él tiene el dinero_ was about the height of Nines's Spanish. So long he had bills in the sock drawer, and he did, nobody made inquiries about his odd schedule or noticed the unsettling quality of # _1C_ 's face. Nobody tried to speak with him. Rent Ma probably thought he was an undercover narc. This was absolutely fine with him. The whole address had a sizzling Agent Orange odor about it—Lysol, risotto and rat poison—which, go figure, must've deterred Camarilla snoopers, too.

Over the bathroom sink, his sinuses still hurting, the bad lighting made Rodriguez look to himself a little off-center from human. It was one of those nights, too. Waking up, coming in here, there's always that off-minute, that odd twang, when you'd catch the reflection of yourself. You identify the body, know intellectually that it's yours. You can see the lines and the birthmarks right where they ought to be. And yet you don't feel the relief, or the familiarity, or the realness. It's just a face. You don't quite recognize that body in the mirror as being you.

The ghost feeling got worse over decades, and at this point, he didn't bother wondering if it was his problem or just one of those things. He turned on the spigot. The tap tasted like iron, but felt normal and OK against his tired face, caught there on the glass with glass-blue in deep sockets. It still didn't look right. Something off about the darkness of the eyelids and the whiteness in the eyeflesh; he had black lashes, the warlike sort of nose you'd expect him to have, and a mouth in which his canine teeth didn't sit comfortably. He looked like a guy who maybe had about six months left on his ticket; there was a vague suggestion of sickness under direct light, of somebody who might not be around too much longer. The single freckle on his left cheek tried its best to make him look like a person. He scrubbed hard to get some blood moving before twisting off the faucet; it protested in sharp, startled squeaks.

Scavenged clothes from the bedroom floor: a shirt, a knife slipped in the neck of a boot, jeans that were relatively unworn. Damsel had been harping him about bulletproof since the Nocturne last year, and she was probably right, but Nines didn't want to appear afraid. He put everything else on.

There was a lot of backlash to check-up on today. There was a lot that could have gone wrong.

The anemic yellow fridge-glow always turned him to ash; he tried not to look at his arm on the handle. Empty racks: a scattering of beer cans, one fogged half-bag of bagels (stale), and a carton of milk for appearances, just in case. In the crisper, three plastic skins of blood under a towel. Better not to use it up. He gave up his search and threw the milk out.

Then he grabbed for a coat, tucked in his wallet, and went through the door with a Colt pinned between his belt and his spine.

One scummy flight of stairs took Nines above ground and immediately onto the street. It was already climbing. Liquor stores; down-and-outs; some kids hanging around with gats, thought guns made them gangsters. This cholita he'd kind of had an eye on for a while was guarding the intersection, keeping tabs on the poor babies working the corner; she shot him the macho hello-frown that somebody with a five-buck pistol and a regular night shift shoots you. But he wasn't recruiting tonight, and wasn't looking for an elbow in the face or a fist full of keys. He was too big and too lazy to pick on the ones who fight back. Which was precisely why he got in his car and got off that block and was driving for Hollywood Boulevard on a quarter-tank of gas.

It was noisy out tonight. No particular noise—just a big, muddled, everywhere-noise: weather in the palms, chopping up the surf, hiccupping the tinny radio. Wind following a hot, thunderstorm day into a hotter, cloudy evening. These are the sounds that tend to give your mind wandering legs, let your concentration go to sleep. Nines was driving a secondhand Ford these days, a piece-of-shit pickup Kent had grabbed him; the silver paint was down to metal in some places and the axels squeaked; the AC, of course, was busted. The flatbed was currently full of ammunition that rattled in a spooky skeleton way.

You could try forgetting about that everywhere noise, but you would not succeed. Nines Rodriguez heard everything now. He had a drumming in his head. He'd stopped pointing out the gunshots. He drove with his windows down and had the low-burn paranoia of not being able to shake all this nonsense and listen to any one particular thing.

He can't remember a time when there had not been a city and he had not been in it.

St. Louis, Chicago, San Francisco, and now The Angels; there comes a point in an animal's life where it knows it can't get out anymore. Cities are too many voices talking at once. Rochelle used to say that everywhere-noise reassured her. It made Nines sick and anxious.

But hey, you know what: Rochelle is dead-as, and Nines Rodriguez? Still here.

When you become an old Anarch, you begin to be sick a little differently. You start to taste something useful about the horror, something that could be tempered and stuck in an eye. Mixed with the tarmac is always that faint LA scent of something on fire. Avant-garde in Hollywood; Black Hand on the beachfront; Kuei-jin at the edges; Nosferatu in the sewers; Camarilla expansionism and Anarch resistance to that expansionism—everybody's here. It's a high-octane rumble. Nobody knows what anybody else really thinks.

For the Free-State, it's got to be a city; there's always the promise, and always the big, flashy boom at the end.

Nines has kept his hand on this Domain for six years now. Say what you want about him, but he had not auctioned his State away when the Camarilla sharks swam in. He held on. The farther away their boundary claims pushed him, the tighter he clenched. Angeltown wasn't whimpering away like the rest of them had—not Santa Monica, clambering to join the club like a used-to-be-somebody bitch; not Hollywood, limping into a corner with arms full of Camarilla cash. LA is unswallowable. LA would dig the fuck in until the python trying to eat them felt spurs hit its ribs, shred all the way down. LA would at least leave some scars behind.

He doesn't feel old. Not really, but he feels like he's been fighting the same people for a very long time, and Nines Rodriguez has to wonder if that fight is over in a time when he is really the best they have left.

The stereo was mostly growling static, so he turned it off. Nines tried to check the time. He found five unanswered voice-messages from Damsel instead; they splintered into straight profanity roundabout the third, and he stopped listening halfway through.

Damsel was a last-minute Den Mother. She'd joined on seven, eight years back in San Fran; 'joined,' anyway, meaning he'd dragged that kid out from a rubbled building and her predecessor's dust pile thirty minutes after they met. Jackie'd been an alarming intelligence, a stand-up talker, and a comfortable personality whom Rodriguez had always admired. Red had been quiet as a chapel mouse. She didn't have a clue. So, after the Sabbat bombs had gone off and they were full of soot and gasoline and bits of glass, Nines took Damsel home. Hadn't said a word the whole way—just sat in the back of his car with a glazed look and a busted nose, reading highway signs count down to Los Angeles. She'd a shard of mall window the size of a dinner plate wedged in one cheek and soon as they got to the city—soon as she shook off that shellshock quiet—she yelled at everybody who talked at her, never really stopped.

There were some pretty good reasons Nines Rodriguez had never wanted anything to do with making a Childe—but in the way most things happened to him, he got saddled with one anyway.

Jackie had been Damsel's first hero, so goes the story. This college-town Jewish girl, faraway from home, opens her mouth and gets stomped on by skinheads, has to be rescued by a nice Motor City vampire with a bleedy heart. Now the leftover kid's on Hero Number Two—which means she's in the army, barking doctrines until Skelter'd heard enough and those two ended up at one another's throat. Nines took the tagalong with a try-to-be-tolerant calm. _"Little girl, little girl, where do you think you are?"_ he used to chide her, until Damsel cold-cut stopped answering to it. But he can't afford to be choosey. A Baron needs somebody to stand a little behind him and cover his tracks.

And he needs a Den Mother, since their former one—a statuesque, sweet-voiced blonde who called herself Houlihan and largely kept away from Rodriguez—disappeared shortly after he took charge. Might've bit it, but Nines had a feeling Houlihan ran off because she'd been afraid he would take over and kill her. Funny he'd been worrying exactly the same thing. MacNeil used to let his two lieutenants cat-eye each other and brush shoulders like that. They'd make different friends, gather rival bids, try to get popular; they'd act real nice face-to-face ( _hey sweetheart how you doing? you OK? how's your people?)_ ; then they'd glare nasty at each other's backs. Now, Rodriguez didn't bear Houlihan any ill will, but it is what it is in LA, and he doesn't let a sweet voice get one cent of love from him.

Guess you know how that all turned out.

Damsel was too green for the position, truth be told. He'd appointed her because she was available, she was Brujah, and she wasn't going to speak a word against him; for all that yelling, Red was easy to control. You knew when she'd be where she'd be and what she'd be doing there. She was a good kid. Pissed him off sometimes, but that's the way it goes.

He deleted the messages, and then he looked up, and like nothing's ever changed in this city he's in Hollywood. It's a slum with nice cufflinks. But it's one of two hunting zones open to Anarchs these days, and you probably shouldn't feed where you live. A drive by Ash Rivers's pouty little club was usually enough. Rivers himself was a teenage rebel, but once, not too terrible long ago, Baron Angeltown had started some shit in a townhall—didn't matter what that shit had been about anymore—and Ash was the second one out of his seat. It was probably a fluke and it was undoubtedly more about pissing off Isaac than supporting Nines, but Rodriguez didn't plan on actually stepping into the building. He had other places to be tonight. He was just going to sweep on by.

The parking garage around back of Ash's place was a fucking mess, full of crunched bottles and spilled beer smell. Nines flashed his high beams to look around, then got out. This many cars made him uneasy, but the Camarilla hadn't condescend to assassinate him for a while. They tried once, got their Nosferatu hitman taken out at thirty-five yards, and realized making a martyr was maybe not all that wise.

He picked up his phone and dialed and said _hello who is this, is this Skelter, mhm it's me, I'll be there in an hour or so. Will you let Damsel know. No, just do it. Because I don't want to hear a motherfucking monologue right now, how's that? Oh you know she is. Uh-huh, OK, that's what I said, see you._

To tell you the truth none of this shit is even hard.

Think what you want about the Brujah. In politics, it is always going to be about personality, and he does the play-dumb-speak-soft thing pretty well. Nines is not what you'd call a man's-man, so he knows what he needs to do is make everyone and their cousin fall in love. With a person or a cause—same difference, same thing, one-and-the-other. So Nines Rodriguez is awful serious. He honors the American Dream. He sounds like an average joe white guy with a sweet mother back in Wichita and a shotgun in his closet, except when he doesn't—when he talks like it's moment in history, right now, and you are a part of it, too. He calls everybody honey. He is just unavailable enough. He does not do auditorium speeches. He won't use your name until you think he's forgotten what it is. Then he says Carlos, Natisha, Jessica, Ahmed, Katie, believe me. I know where you come from and I've been who you are.

People have always liked Nines Rodriguez. Most of the time more than they should have. He'd be lying if he claimed not to notice and lying worse if he claimed not to know why.

Play-dumb, talk-soft. Old boy MacNeil walked the man's-man walk; look at what that got him.

In the city, you don't need to have much time, because you never have to wait long. You get animal eyes and you stop seeing things people care about. You stop seeing bodies, and gender, and the picture a bunch of features make up. You see empty expressions; the side-eye, the tired mouth; the prey-look; the lostness of direction, the headphones in, the difficult shoes. You see a limp in the left leg and somebody who probably doesn't have a gun. He waited maybe ten minutes, looking like an unsuspicious guy on his phone until somebody came out of the bar, then he tilted his head and shot a smile filthy in its innocuousness and it's play-dumb all over again. This is the part everybody panics about on their first weird nights, but it's not hard anymore a few weeks in, once you transition past the moral squirming and the painful flailing of the those first inevitable fuck-ups. You just fake it, frankly, and frankly, in that sense, predation isn't too different from the sleazy shit you did when you were alive.

"Hey, you didn't see my Bug, did you? I lost it." She tried to be cute but by this point you don't really notice kids' faces, do you? "It's blue. It's a blue Bug. A Beetle."

That's all this is. If you're a certain type of person, that's all anything ever is.

He said _I don't know where your car is honey but this one runs pretty well, do you need a ride home?_ She said why should I trust you, you're just some guy. He said _I'm a cop,_ which was a cheap lie, but Nines knew he had a face women want to trust. She said really well where's your uniform; he said I'm off-duty; she said oh, so a cop, huh, but only when the sun's up right? He said that's right.

When Rochelle first noticed him—weird night, October of 1924, noisy and too cold—she'd been waiting maybe ten minutes for a meeting, standing around a rival's product warehouse in a rainwet peacoat with a Bugsy fedora and white gloves. She walked right up to the new kid and made him smile. That is to say she _made_ him smile—stuck a finger in and pried his bottom jaw from the top, said, _"You got pretty teeth, baby."_ She said _you a talker, slick? Huh? Speakuh the English, angel? Got a tongue in your head? Baby,_ she said, _let me get you a cool hat and a tie. How are you with that gun? You enjoy this door job, sugar? You getting fairly compensated? Getting your dues? Because I see a couple of little-leagues mobsters wasting you in this muscle gig, boyo. If you ask me. Good-looking young kid. Nice smile, girls like you? Want to make some easy money?_ She said _well, I am a talent hunter and I am looking to hire a few kids like you._ She said _I am in the people business._ She said _honey,_ _I say this as a businesswoman and in your best interests: you ought to put teeth like that to use._

November 1924, weird night and some mafioso class act is handing him a gun, always smiling, saying follow my lead and put this in your pocket, kiddo, case one of ours girls pulls a runner. Sometimes the foreign kids come in with less than a full appreciation of what they got hired for.

1925 and some kid with his face is doing the smiling, baring those teeth hard as he can, saying, _"Excuse me, miss; miss, hello; were you on that train? Welcome to Chicago; where are you from? you Irish? Polish? Czech? Italian? Oh yeah? all the way from Warsaw, huh? Oh yeah? my best good buddy is from St. Petersburg. Oh yeah? I just moved here myself. Honey, let me help you with that suitcase. Say, is there any chance you're looking for a job?"_

Twenty-first century and he says _kid, come here and let me tell you the real story._

What Nines remembers does not frighten him. It's what he can't remember that gets him worrying like this. Noisy nights, sometimes you'd think you could almost recall what daylight was, a tepid orange glimpse blinking closed over crumbling corn in east Missouri. He'd had a baby-face back then and he always needed a haircut. Jaunty elbows, stupid shy, smashed under a brimmed hat that tried to be tough. Back-when it wasn't a number but an honest-to-god name. His mother couldn't decide how to say it; she'd swap _dah-víd_ for _day-vid_ and swap back just as fast, culture erasure she never trained her tongue for. He still didn't know which way it was meant to be pronounced. Now Nines's hair grew so fast he just took kitchen scissors to it. Black tendrils stuck on the sink, city water, and there's something he's supposed to be remembering, here, but then he wakes up and twists the faucet on and splashes his eyes and the suggestion of that something is gone.

He didn't want to fight. Really, but he ended up plucking plastic nails out of his tricep and getting a high-heeled bruise in his knee. Then she clonked her head hard on the floorboard of the truck and passed out and he had to put her somewhere. There was a keyring in her purse, so he found the blue Bug and locked her in the backseat. He scrubbed at a bloodstain on the collar of his shirt.

There was still a lot to do tonight; Nines went home.

A streetlight had been shot out in front of The Last Round. It was Preacher's fault, Skelter said. And no, the measly fuck had not stuck around to apologize. I'm charging for damages, he added, then led Rodriguez to a smoky booth inside.

Damages? Nines said. Really. Have you taken a look around here lately? Flaking wallpaper, squeaking bar stools, ripped upholstery; it was a dive, but there was no Anarch corner in the Angels more well-established than right here. When Baron Rodriguez became Baron Rodriguez and took charge of their old place, the he'd torn down a ratty dartboard hanging above the mantle, plastered over the nail holes with a badly-creased portrait of Rochelle, and let that black-eyed canvas christen the growing wall of dead photos they'd since begun to call Memorial Row. Nines wasn't sentimental, but it worked. All those ghost eyes staring down at them day-in, day-out kept kids sober—kept them full of hate and ready to be remembered. He'd had it for years, that portrait, but couldn't stand to look at the face, couldn't stand to be seen by her anymore, and so stuck it in a book that got stuck on a shelf and carried that way a long time. Now he dressed that woman up like an everyman's war chief who'd faced down Big Men with a serious mouth and a curt, romantic, fast notion of justice.

Truth is Rochelle was a fucking monster. She was a Big Man who sold clean suits and pistols to lost boys so they'd go out and sell some poor babies to other Big Men. She hadn't done jack shit for the Cause, and he hated her guts right up until the day she died, but Brujah need martyrs when monsters are all they have.

Skelter didn't stand a chance tonight. The damages rant had him frowning, committing heavy hands into perpetual fists, pulling old scar tissue over militant angles. His left brow had been split decades ago by a Viet Cong carbine that broke the socket, and you could never approximately tell what expression it wanted to make. He was glad to have that scar, so the old soldier told him once; it was a memento now, demarcating something he'd survived. It was a good lesson for children. If the toughest guy you know can be hurt, then what did you suppose might happen to you?

"Sorry to say that streetlight is not even the first layer of shit I've got to deliver to you," Skelter said, brow furrowing, as Nines perched on a table edge. Slow nights like the one they were in, you could taste the bad news coming, hanging low and simmering in the silence of scattered kids smoking and sleeping and drinking. Damsel was nowhere around.

"Where's Red?" Nines asked. Skelter did not seem to appreciate the question.

"Hell if I know. Getting into something, probably. I'm not her keeper." He stayed standing while the Baron sat—arms crossed over his chest, copper winking in his right ear, eyes unmoving. Skelter was always standing. Skelter was Nines's best man. An officer, not a riot kid with a too-big mouth; he could make his own decisions; he could get quiet and wait something out. He was the only one genuinely worth having around when you needed to ask for a real opinion. "There's something else, anyway. You know I hate to bear all the doom and gloom around here, I really do, but better I tell you upfront. Oh—actually, before I get into that: Jack says Christie sends her thanks." It wasn't enough to make those grim eyes move. "She asked to speak to you directly, but I said you had business and would call back some other time. Which was true. And if it wasn't, it's about to be. Now, I don't know too much about this yet, but you ought to be aware."

Rodriguez's elbows propped themselves on both his dangling knees. "Just say it, Skelter."

"I'm getting there. Fucking Cam." There was startling clarity to that angry look through the smogginess in here. Nines thought Skelter made for a better Brujah than he-himself did. "Again, I have yet to fact-check, so you'll have to take anything I tell you about this for what it's worth. And we haven't been able to confirm if this is an official response or not. Or if it has shit to do with de Luca. That's just my guess."

"Then tell me your guess." Nines scratched at the stain on his shirt. The younger Anarch bit his lips.

"Look, it's probably not going to amount to anything. But I suspect there's a reinforcement bid going in the ivory tower. To what end, I have no idea. Which is half the reason why I recommend we keep an eye on it. We learned last night that—"

A thump-thump from the back door sliced him off.

"There the fuck you are!" it said. Damsel had stomped in from the garage and was across The Last Round's entire first floor in ten short-legged lunges, scowl intensifying with each footfall. Nines already knew earful he knew he was about to get.

"Why don't you check your fucking phone sometime?" she snapped. Red was all bristling color moving right at you—Army Surplus, stout shoulders, low browy brim of a stupid hat. She was maybe five-foot-two. "Can't stay on top of this shit if no one can get a fucking hold of you. Baron LA my ass. Do I have to come banging your goddamn door down every time I need to find you, or what?"

"You found me."

"Fuck you, Nines. I can't believe I put up with you."

And right there, out of the blue, the whole thing kind of tickled him. It kind of pleased Nines, kind of made him smile in the way of something that'd happened before, over-and-over-and-over, so he socked her arm. Red cussed again. It was a lovetap hard enough to make her hop but not enough to actually hurt. She was mean and compact and could take it. She had a pistol stuffed in her cargo pockets and a mouthful of vicious little teeth.

Skelter didn't look too happy about losing Nines's attention so fast. He shot Damsel a sub-zero glance that had no power on her. "I was just telling him about Venture's mail-order hit."

"So you're wasting his time with unverified bullshit. _Pfft_. Not like this is a new story: stomp one patsy and the Prince overnights five."

The glance went glare. "You don't overnight a patsy. You overnight an eyewitness. Or a deputy."

"Deputy dogcatcher, maybe. Whatever," she chuffed. "Doesn't mean he's got shit to actually _bring_ to court, and it doesn't mean we have to freak everyone the fuck out about it. Tell me, honestly. What's another porker? To this place. Who the fuck even cares? There's barely a Board up, not anymore; nobody important gives a shit; and obviously the new admin isn't pent up about birth certificates. So you're going to have to explain something to me before I get scared enough to bother with this. Explain to me what the hell LaCroix could possibly expect to do with some junior-sheriff teabag that he couldn't do with Bitch-Boy de Luca, Childe of the Headless Woman?" Malice lit her up—pea-green, caustic, full of unsatisfaction. "I read the report. I read it, Nines, and it's not a real problem. Torched his shoe-polisher, so he sends in a lawyer. A lawyer. Are we scared of lawyers now? I mean, are you serious with this shit? Don't make me laugh."

"Doughie called a few hours ago," Skelter cut in. He saw the confusion start to darken their Baron's face. "Lawyer all the fuck you want. Looks to me like the Prince flew in a hatchetman. And the specifics are real fucking suspicious. Doesn't line up right with what I've seen from him in these other trials—shit, he scrounged his last man out of a late-night execution; now he red-eyes somebody from halfway across the world? Son-of-a-bitch has something on the back-burner. I've got a feeling he's setting up his jury here; like I said, it's not clear for what. We do not know. I wish I had intel on her years ago, but what would LaCroix need a fall guy for? Who would he be hatcheting at? Hmm, I wonder."

Skelter didn't need to finish. Nines looked up from the top of his eyes. "I maybe have a couple ideas."

"You can make your guesses same as I made mine. Which is that you should be careful—more so than usual. At least for the next few weeks, until I can get a read on what closed-doors bullshit they're trying to pull."

"Please," Damsel ruffed, her style of coping: _I dare you_. Skelter ignored the bait. His eyes were that soft, fatal kind of concerned.

"Just a feeling," he mumbled, but Baron LA had plenty of just-feelings himself over these years. "I hope I'm paranoid. But if I'm not: we will be prepared for this."

Same old soldier he's always had at every point of this life: Chester, Don, Casey Jane, a cap and a gun and a casket kind of loyalty. They all held themselves this way. Skelter wasn't slushy enough to actually talk about it but he didn't have to be. They all got that _I know my price_ look _._

"What a fucking joke. Don't even worry about it, Nines. We can take care of a deputy just like we did a poster child. That's how we handle pigs in LA. And if they can't get with the goddamn game-plan, then they're going to keep losing their—"

Rodriguez, now irritated in earnest, frowned. "What the hell are we talking about?"

The soldiers stilled.

Damsel rounded the bar and produced from a storage locker one sloppy portfolio. Inside: Foundation documents, travel dates, disposable photographs, certifications, and a solitary passport scan.

"I told you first. Hatchetman," Skelter said.

Nines Rodriguez flipped open a folder and read the name beneath the unkind face.


	5. Expert Opinion

INCIDENT INVESTIGATION  
CITY OF LOS ANGELES

CONDUCT ANALYSIS of  
VICTOR DE LUCA  
(DECEASED)

 

**DRAFT**

 

INCIDENT

On Wednesday, January 13, 2010, at approximately 0100 PST, LaCroix Foundation employee and Camarilla agent Victor de Luca was involved in a critical incident resulting in agent’s death.

 

INVESTIGATION SUMMARY

Overview

First-responder accounts report agent sustained a fatal blast upon interacting with his personal vehicle. Explosion and associated damages are being investigated as a probable terrorist activity. Several persons of interest have been identified within the Los Angeles Anarch Party. No individual suspects have been named at this time.

 

Aims and Objectives

This report was compiled to ascertain if Victor de Luca was, in the weeks prior to his death, operating in adherence to Camarilla protocol.

 

Methods of Investigation

Personnel file has been searched and declassified. Agent’s assignment history and hours of operation were cross-referenced with automobile GPS data. Coworkers have been interviewed via telephone to confirm dates and times of contact when applicable; written testimonies will be made available upon specific request. A property search was conducted immediately following the incident. No relevant or incriminating materials were seized.

 

Recommendations

Witness accounts regarding the week preceding Mr. de Luca’s death—i.e. his purported encounter with Free-State agitators in Long Beach, which allegedly resulted in two deaths—are questionable and partisan. It is not immediately apparent if the supposed victims encountered Mr. de Luca, or indeed if they existed. There is currently no evidence suggesting the deceased had cause or leave to operate outside Central Los Angeles.

Author recommends all unverifiable testimonies and anonymous tips be publicly discredited, and any existing literature addressing this rumor be expunged from future investigations of agent’s wrongful death.

 

DATA

A comprehensive listing of Mr. de Luca’s official activities (pp. 3-67) and a map of the patrol area (p. 2) are attached for your review.  (See appendix.)

 

CONCLUSION

We are left to conclude that Mr. de Luca was operating within the parameters assigned to him as an agent of law enforcement, and any potential offensive maneuvers executed by said agent constitute legal use of force.

 

**_[It is my expert opinion that the fatal action taken against the deceased be ruled a homicide, and all organizational actors be prosecuted to the full extent of Camarilla law.]_ **

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
HENDON ESTATES

 

* * *

 

EDITOR’S NOTES

 

_Mr. LaCroix,_

_Bracketed portion added by your request. At your leave, I’ll stamp the document and submit it to the Primogen._

_As of this evening, Mr. Linville has been terminated and cleared out of his (former) office. We are all ready for Ms. Woeburne to move in. I am sure she will have a very comfortable stay._

_Joelle_


	6. Good People

Ms. Woeburne hard-set her chin, shouldered her portfolio case, and stepped through the federal black double-doors of Venture Tower.

"Dear sister. You are _here_!" The vampire sitting in the lobby wore a bright red suit and she belted it out as our soldier walked in.

Two seconds, and that red, red suit was shuffling around her marbled desk on perilous Kleins to seize Dear Sister's cold hands. Vindictive ceiling lights turned a caramel chignon into flawless, frightening blue. She pressed all ten fingers insistently around the Ventrue's; her manicure left dents upon the Woeburne's plain, clean knuckles, and they took a long time to fill out. "Bonsoir! My dear. Welcome," she cooed, caricature Frenchness and thick, unaffected eyelashes. "You have finally made it! How was your flight?"

S.W. absorbed a hennish kiss on either cheek. "Nice to see you, Joelle," she told the glossy Toreador, manufacturing a little friendship. Very little. "It was all right. Glad to be on the ground again, though."

Her so-called friend smiled. "Of _course_ you are," she said.

' _Bitch,_ ' Ms. Woeburne thought, not feeling much better.

Joelle was our soldier's company senior and better at the pretense game by far, in every way. Six decades she'd worked at LaCroix Foundation—and for a considerable number of those decades, had been insufferable to Ms. Woeburne, if you count excessive sweetness as suffering. Theirs was a relationship built off backhanded compliments and smacking kisses, bricked by niceties and bowtied with dry, cordial hellos.

"You never do come to a full stop, do you? But you've been on your feet for days. And aren't you exhausted? Please." Stylish hands moved to take the traveler's bag, but S.W. didn't give it up. She tried to ignore the loose string of pearls looped around that elegant, rosewater neck. Joelle's knuckles were frigid; the Foreman's were stone.

"Shall we head up straightaway?" Ms. Woeburne suggested instead.

"Whatever you'd like, dear. After you," she professed, and they went.

Fake, sensational mademoiselle—eyes yellow-brown like a hawk's, smile like cellophane. She was an intentional stereotype shimmying around this otherwise serious building, tailored-up like a joke on everyone else. S.W. did not appreciate being twenty years junior such a damn poodle. The façade was a façade—but something about Joelle Lefevre. Something about those fishnet legs, hard stare, and new world glamor pissed Woeburne off beyond all reasonable logic. Being drop-dead gorgeous did not help her case.

The sound of shoeheels on the floors in here was overwhelming. They clattered up one dramatic flight of stairs, into a bitterly cold elevator, then down the sterile white hallway towards Mr. LaCroix's penthouse office. Joelle prattled, happy and shameless; it was her touch of groveling.

"I am so sorry, my dear sister. I would have paid for your taxi, you know, but—ah, silly me! I didn't recognize you from the security cameras. Something is different?" A shark's gaze flicked sidelong. S.W. wished she'd worn a hat. Or a scarf. Or a paper sack. "Oh! Of course. You have changed your hairstyle."

"I'm afraid so."

The last occasion she'd had seen either Joelle or Sebastian was in London during her Sire's annual United Kingdom stay. Ms. Woeburne had sported two feet of listless brunette then. It was early wintertime, and she remembered their visit mostly because thanks to the seethe of discovering her Sire brought this prancing terrier along to keep his books. Joelle Lefevre—she'd dropped all her red things right upon the lobby carpet as if someone might take them away. Then the haute flamingo went off through Mr. LaCroix's estate as though it was a home, leaving him there at the door, shaking rainwater off his trench coat with tangent irritation on a fair face. S.W. stood beside him, smelling of storm weather and a Toreador hug. Lefevre's puce gloves had made her heavy mane damp where they'd clasped. Now it was short, one-fourth the original length, ridges neatly grazing the cut of her chin. She couldn't compete if she had bothered to.

"Function never hurt anyone," says a Ventrue Childe.

"Not at all, chérie. It looks very fine." Ms. Woeburne could tell by that glitter in her smile Joelle was lying.

"Well," was all she said in return. Fists tightened around her shoulder strap. _'Miserable, nasty, toffee-nosed French-Canadian bitch.'_

Everyone at Hendon had told Mlle. Lefevre, with varying degrees of sincerity, she looked like someone who was both famous and palatably exotic. It was always Billie Holiday; Dorothy Dandridge; Diana Sands; someone who had little in common with her beyond skinny eyebrows, a face thin enough to be attractive, and a vaguely similar melanin count. Joelle would wince with the front teeth of derision and say, _"Aren't you sweet. Actually, I look like Joelle Lefevre_."

Ms. Woeburne would have liked to relate, but no one had ever said she looked like anyone—and no one had ever assumed, to her knowledge, that she came from anywhere but the driest part of Londontown.

Joelle Lefevre, looking like no one but herself, spun a startling half-turn at the ominous door. She made a scarlet gash in all this gold and bleach, looking like a spot that had bled out.

"And here we are," the Toreador announced. S.W. pushed wire frames up the bridge of her nose. They faced one another beneath a camera masquerading as a chandelier. "I'll leave you to it with that, dear. But before I go back downstairs, I must first say that it is so lovely to be working together again. And in California, of all places—such a surprise to have you here." Such a surprise: a malicious, cordial little wink at the back of Ms. Woeburne's unmemorable self. "And please, do head right in; don't worry a mite. I am sure Mssr. LaCroix is expecting you. I called four times today to remind him. But don't keep the Prince long, no? He is very, very busy."

She didn't even shoot a scathing look. Ms. Woeburne but rapped thrice, and pushed her way in.

Sebastian didn't rise from his desk at first. The Prince was preoccupied with a sheaf of reports and, more immediately, by the office phone pressed to one ear. There was a distracted scowl on his face; deep-set eyes did not lift. They were sunless ocean water. He was red-blond with a particular malice. He halted Ms. Woeburne by raising two firm, unfriendly digits.

"Maximillian, I have a business call," said her Sire—still hadn't looked up—chagrin edging into the crisp and coolly familiar voice. Ms. Woeburne didn't take offense. She sat rigidly in a visitor's chair and watched the soldierlike 'M' of her progenitor's frown stiffen. "She just walked in. We'll have to speak later. Of course I do. Expect more from us shortly; my representative will send along the testimonies. And, on that point: do not mistake my adherence to protocol as a lax response." There was a tense, hairline pause. LaCroix's mouth pressed one indignant muscle tighter. "All this is understood. As I've heard. Yes. All right. Goodbye."

"Out for my blood already, I take it." S.W. rose from her chair at the receiver click, stepping into Sebastian's handshake.

He issued an irritable puff _indeed_. Theirs was a firm, uncompromising clasp. It was welcoming enough, but even so, his hello still felt disinterested, and her hand was always cold. "Ms. Woeburne. How do you do."

The Foreman's grin was troubled, to be sure, but mostly sincere. "Fine," she told him, because with these people, it is never excellent; it is always _fine_. "Just fine. Bit tired. Thank you."

Mr. LaCroix—infamously impatient—saw no need to dance around a greeting any more than that; he'd seen her before, and would again. Yet there is no rarer sentiment than appreciation from a person like this, even when it's measured out like salt. She was a little taller than him in tall shoes. "Thank you for responding quickly to my summons. It's a relief to have you in this office. Your arrangements are suitable, I trust?"

"Oh, of course they are. Joelle was very helpful."

"No doubt. She is helpful enough—for what I've asked her to do," he said, which gave the passive-aggressive Childe no small dose of wicked pleasure. She withdrew and reseated herself. There was a formula to their politeness, and the mathematics worked just fine for her.

"Little unfair of you. I'm sure she is uniquely qualified." Ms. Woeburne's eye teeth were sharp apexes inside a serious, stoic mouth. Neither of them smiled. It was a bit of a joke.

"I wouldn't want to be unfair." He, too, settled into his seat, looking authoritarian behind an altar of desk. Then it was neat, tidy praise for a petty officer. She'd take it. "But in this case, I prefer someone like you. I need your discretion, and most importantly: I need you _here_. "

"It won't be an issue. Mr. Roderick is set at Hendon for several months or more. By all means, I could get a—"

"You've cut off your hair," the Prince observed. All of a sudden, just like that. S.W. touched her scalp defensively.

"Yes. Yes, I—I did." She unhooked one leg from the other and pressed both knees together, ten toes on the floor, spine straight. The fireplace made this room feel bizarrely like a December.

"Shame."

A small thing, that sigh. Ms. Woeburne floundered for a few seconds, insides unhappy, feeling helpless.

It was a relief when they spoke again. He brushed aside the minor disapproval and leveled with her. "In any case. Prior to long-term planning on our behalf, I should update you. You understand the somewhat delicate position in which Mr. de Luca's death has left me, yes?"

"That I do. I was sorry to hear it."

Sebastian nodded, fingers folding beneath his chin, elbows propped on the polished desktop within which you could see every flame-point of his chandelier. The chair was too large; aniline leather, alcohol, and black walnut made him look smaller than he actually was. His was the cool look of Manifest Destiny and white collar crime. "It was an unfortunate turn," he said. "And it was clearly meant as an insult to my cabinet. Mr. de Luca had accrued some small degree of fame, given the unfortunate circumstances of his Embrace. I suspect the murder was—at least partially—meant to send the message that this administration is incapable of keeping its wards out of trouble. Double-back politics. Murder a government agent and then accuse him of wrongdoing post-mortem to stanch the blood. It's something I might have seen coming. And if I had my way, there would be a Hunt in circulation. We clearly lack the evidence to make such a motion; I have always been lawful about the use of enforcers. But all the same, we shan't let those responsible go without punishment because of a bad precedent."

"And—this goes without saying, I hope—I will happily help you in that." It's not apple-polishing, not really. This is simply good timing. "I mean, I realize I'm not police. But I can facilitate a police government. I can certainly work on a Board. What I'm saying is: if there's to be a tribunal, you can count on my vote."

LaCroix didn't accept her miniature vow. His shoulder-blades pressed casually, discontentedly, into the cushion. His hand swept a dismissive _no_. "This is certainly of Board interest, Ms. Woeburne. But it is not a question of war in Los Angeles. It is more a matter of…" He thought about it. "Risk control."

S.W. narrowed. Both her feet were still grounded—sturdily, evenly, on the floor. "Risk control, sir."

"Precisely."

"I'm the best candidate for something like that?" Ms. Woeburne frowned with an index pressed along her jaw. Her concern was genuine in its attempt to appear strong, bleak, indifferent. But insecurities moiled. No one had mentioned this role in her vague invitation—and, if it needs to be said, a history of trivial hospitality, clerical work, and property-holding does not include murder trials. Her lamentable sense of gender shone through that glum face. "Don't mistake me. I'm willing to do whatever you need. But my experience with the judiciary isn't what it could be."

"If you must disclaimer yourself, Ms. Woeburne, I suppose you will." The Prince picked at her with one nonplussed, lukewarm remark. She shifted in her uncomfortable chair.

"I'm only being cautious. There's nothing wrong with that."

"Be as cautious as you please, but don't doubt my hiring choices. Your name didn't apparate from nothing. This isn't a formal overture or ambassadorial work I am proposing, do you understand?" His fingertips rapped the desk twice. "What troubles Los Angeles these nights isn't quite that philosophical and I daresay it doesn't have much place in a forum. It comes down to a crisis of organization. You are extremely organized. Furthermore, you are subtle, and you are a skeptic. You keep on top of things. You are exactly what the administration needs in an officer right now."

"I'm humbled," she admitted. It was not exactly the right word. "But I'm sorry—I'm still not caught up with the Primogen, or how they received my report. And until I get that issue settled—it's just, well. I don't want to be difficult. I'm only thinking of the collateral."

"Sometimes collateral is necessary to put your pieces at position. I have every faith in you, Ms. Woeburne. You can manage. You always have."

The Foreman was quiet. Words like _crisis_ and _forum_ are familiar friends; they cast this precipitous new city in a format S.W. could recognize. She tried to uphold the stern minuteman stare expected of a young Ventrue. Hers was intense, fast-blinking, and perniciously green. "I suppose I have," she said.

A nod. There's something contemptuous about a Prince's approval, though. Always is.

"And thank you. For your confidence. Sir. I appreciate it. Besides." One thumb parked her frames closer to the lashes. "I suppose if it's management you're asking for, I've got a track record. I've got the degree."

"In a sense, yes." Sebastian's look had gone distant, something dispassionate and dictatorial. "I've tolerated many transgressions from the locals, but I will not ignore a homicide. You know the details. Ergo, you also know this case must be brought, as cleanly as possible, to its end."

"And I've come," she promised, gravely, as much a corporal as could be in a suit.

"Indeed," he agreed. "You have."

The Prince rose, then, steering himself up and before that menacing window. Ms. Woeburne did not. From where she sat, safe in subordinacy, you could see both the hands clasp loosely behind her predecessor's back. There it was, that minuteman stature: chin erect, shoulders square, regency stark beneath the toothy jawbone of a tall city sky. Good Ventrue. Not so good, perhaps, at other things.

"Tell me something, Ms. Woeburne. Since you are here, and since you can manage." His English was over-enunciated and brutally precise. "What would you say running a bit of interference for me?"

Ms. Woeburne thought less, and stood quickly, and shook her Sire's hand.

"Of course," she said.

 _Yes_ is what Good People ought to do.


	7. Re: Tadpoles

**TO: ROZALIN GREENE**  
**FROM: CLAUDIA FAIRHOLM**  
**DATE: JANUARY 17, 2010 10:43 PM**  
**SUBJECT: FWD: DE LUCA INVESTIGATION**

 

Rozalin! Can you believe what the cherub in the tower has gone and stuffed in your mailbox now?

You know, we could be offended by this, if we bothered. What good is being Primogen if you don’t buddy up and make a stink every once in a blue moon? But one has to wonder: is there even a point? Personally, I find it quite remarkable! In the way of a scientific curiosity, my love. Or a piece of Old West folklore. Sebastian LaCroix, cryptozoo wonder, Man Without Shame. Blondest Snake on the Golden Coast. Only he would try to pass his aide’s badly-written social studies paper off as a third-party investigation. 

Expert opinion! La classe!

Even Alistair will laugh at this one. Maybe I’ll give him a call.

Speaking of calls. I had a little heart-to-heart with Rama Linville this evening. You’re acquainted with Rama, aren’t you, Roz? He’s a cute little thing on the Board, one of the newer Aediles, bit left-of-center. Or he _was_ this time yesterday. Because—and this number gets better and better—the cheeky son-of-a-bitch up and fired him! No warning. Just poofed! “Please clear out your things by midnight; your station is being terminated.” How do you like that?

Apparently, as though the word nepotism has never-ever forced its way into his lexicon, our Prince is bussing his baby down here and sticking her in the corner office, instead. Can you even believe?  Of course you can; look who we’re talking about. I’d say “there’s no way in hell he’ll actually give her a vote,” but LaCroix is as LaCroix does! You couldn’t make this up.

It’s too bad, because I just loved Rama.

Isaac is going to _die_. Do you guess the Prince is going to try and press a countercharge on their countercharge? He has to realize that if he so much as thinks about calling a Hunt over this, his spaniel is good as cooked. She is probably cooked anyway. Why don’t you just bow-tie a dinner bell around the child’s neck, point her toward Hollywood, and smack her in the rear?

I even want to meet her now. I want LaCroix’s tadpole to look me in the face and shake my hand and pretend there’s nothing at all sketchy about this—oh, business as usual, you know! My, my, my. It’s got to be in the bloodstream. Which means there could be more of him out there. Just think: a little Armée of Sebastian LaCroixs, each pontificating about his own distinction. How will you ever sleep again?

Has Maximilian seen this yet? More dangerously: have the Barons?

We’d better ask our questions quick! Poor girl’s head is going to roll within the week.

 

Tsk,

Claudia


	8. Internal Planning

Ms. Woeburne jostled into the empty conference room with a phone trapped between her shoulder and her ear.

"Calm down and listen to me, Roderick." She pulled shut and locked the door. "Can you do that? I don't understand the problem; we went over this line-by-line three nights ago. I left very specific instructions with Shauna. If you need someone to hold your hand, find hers."

Los Angeles plunged through the glass walls. Downtown was a honeycomb of disorganized light—none of which could reach these tall floors. Venture Tower was quiet, sleek, and cool. The air tasted of ventilation and the furniture smelled new. Up here, S.W. was safe, and she was alone.

She stood in darkness on nubby gray carpet. Not a pencil shaving or espresso spill had ever hit it. Her calves and the backs of her hands looked startling in the aggressive cleanliness of this place, and against the unclean glow of city, sanitized by its windows. The vacuumed office chairs were tucked neatly around polished black wood. There was a nice enough moon outside. She left the light switch switched-off.

Ms. Woeburne sat in one of them, dropping her armful of folders in a smack upon the varnished table. Because no one was here to look disapprovingly, the Foreman wheeled backwards, threw a pen onto the stack, and allowed herself to slump.

"I'm sorry to have to rush off and leave you holding the bag—really I am. But that's why they call them orders and not suggestions." She leant back in her chair, legs flung forward, one palm pressed open on the enamel. A heel slipped out. She pushed the shoe forward with her toes, arches cramping, glad to have stopped for the brief time it took someone to finish printing her paperwork. A sullen ghoul nearly collided with S.W. five steps outside Sebastian's penthouse, nodded wordlessly, and handed over a foot-thick primer, swearing the rest would be xeroxed in ten. _Essential data_ , it claimed. She scoffed.

"You're going to have deal with it. This isn't forever. I'm coming back; I just can't tell you exactly when, all right?"

Ms. Woeburne had no real personal attachment to Roderick Dunn. She could not tell you his middle name or eye color; had never asked if he'd any siblings; didn't know what the bony, fast-talking, red-haired Associate thought of his fifth year at Hendon. Ms. Woeburne _wa_ s sure that, as the young man's direct superior, she did not relish the thought of her holdings in someone else's hands. But it couldn't be dealt with remotely. There was too much else to do.

She had no conscious recollection of how blunt front teeth were making mincemeat of her bottom lip. The taste of flesh was only an afterthought when, later that night, our soldier would glance into a lonely mirror of a lonely apartment bathroom. The reflection that looked back was merciless, staid, milkiness with a suggestion of something hollow, like a baby tooth or a horn. Her eyes glinted in dark circles. Predatory disinterest. She must have been somewhere in there. Somewhere, surely.

"Roderick, why are we discussing expenditures? I don't even want you to think about finances. Ms. Maldano has the critical figures and she'll handle them. All you have to do is make sure the house is in order and nothing explodes. That's it. You are an answerphone with a face."

When Ms. Woeburne first entered Mr. LaCroix's employ, now many years ago, she had felt like a balloon leaking helium. There was a hissing down her limbs, a coldness in her jaw, a perpetual rush. There was odd pressure that never receded, one dozen china balls in the air, the head-pounding impression that a single punch to your glass house would kill you. It was enough to make a person insane. Her wrists began shaking the fifth day; she didn't regain control of them for weeks.

Forty-some years, and there are still those moments she feels them itch, restless, threatening to tremble. She'd flatten ten fingers down on a nice, solid surface, or fold both hands tightly behind her back.

"What do you want me to do about it? Because you must realize I can't do anything. I can't manage you from here." There was no use in feeling badly about it. Liminal space is the Ventrue idea of a harrowing. If you cannot keep up, step aside; too many steps, and you will fall off the earth. It's the cakewalk you have to whittle yourself down for. "Everyone survives this eventually, do you know that. I did. Shauna did. You should. You don't need teacher scratching check-plus on your reports. What do you want me to tell you, exactly—natural selection? Because that's what it is. Accept that. And if you muck something up, that's what I'll tell Mr. LaCroix. I'm not taking any pleasure in this, but understand where you are. Are we clear, here?"

What Ms. Woeburne felt was not quite guilt. A coffeebean lock tickled her lobe. Her eye pencil was beginning to bleed.

"Now don't pin all this on me. It wasn't my notion to up and scrape you all into the frying pit. And look, I'm sure you'll do fine. Passably, at least, and passable is really all I need from you. You aren't expected to reinvent the wheel. Just stick to the directions I left for you. Don't beg, for God's sake, Roderick," she warned—but, of course, he did.

S.W. tried to be reasonable. She tried to be someone to want advice from. "You're getting this all wrong, you know. I'm not testing you. No, I _know_ what it looks like. But I don't have the leverage to be your crutch. I don't even know what I'm _doing_ here," Ms. Woeburne snapped. Selfish, juvenile emotion—scold your subordinate because your clockwork mind is not one-hundred-percent sure how else to conduct itself. "You have a detailed set of instructions. Follow them."

A hank of her short hair— _shame_ —snagged a blazer button, and she spent a frustrated minute unsnarling.

"Fine. Fine. Just. Read me the message." A finger drilled into her eyebrow; she resigned. She didn't have the energy to fight about it anymore. "But this is the one and only time, all right?"

The Foreman listened blandly as Roderick shuffled notes, uncapped a pen, and read-back a letter some London Harpy's assistant left two hours after Ms. Woeburne clapped down the front stair. She didn't gasp or console him. She didn't offer any happy _mm-hm_ s. Deciding _I may as well get a jumpstart on all these documents_ , she pulled off her glasses, flung them upside-down across a SWOT assessment, then read something else. More dossiers incoming. Her rental keys and apartment number would be ready tonight. In this life, with these people, you learn to plan in the interim. Liminal spaces. S.W. could not remember a time where she just sat.

 _Opportunities, alliances, advantages, benchmarks, capital_. Because she is a Ventrue and her prioritizing has a deadly edge, Ms. Woeburne set context aside and immediately flipped for the tab labeled THREATS.

"Of course I'm _listening_ ," S.W. grumbled, nose crinkling, a definitive sign of her telling a lie. Her hands were full of printed pages, damage assessments, and proceeding transcripts. Square nails flick-flick-flicked.

"Wait—hold on. Security fees? _What_ did she say…?" There it was: precisely where she knew it'd be, precisely what she'd been trying to avoid. Anxiety. The old swarm. A thousand unnecessary things beginning to look necessary: things that said intervene, take charge, get kicking, organize this mess. These are hallmarks of Ventrue ambition. Hers had a humble ceiling, but it lived there, buzzing and contracting within the confines. Her spine racked straight in the mildly comfortable chair. There was nothing friendly about the way she laughed. "Hah! Hah-hah! Is it! Oh, that's precious. That's not about to happen. And what did you say?"

You had to wonder about it sometimes, didn't you. What did the empire ever say to make so many empired people join? What can you say to make a conquered soldier pack up his old self, put down the old country, and dress up like you?

They said The Raj will protect you. They said You Have Nothing To Be Afraid Of Now.

A folder thumped back to the table, spilling pages. Kuei-jin insignia and Hollywood expenditures sliding apart across black enamel. Had she not sixteen other things on her mind, Ms. Woeburne might have noticed how the Red List split where she stopped at Chinatown; she might've come to think it odd how, not knowing why Sebastian brought her to LA, THREATS fell open to a sheet that said ANARCHS, and a satellite photograph of three. The names read: ISAAC ABRAMS, ELIZABETH BECKMAN (ALIAS: DAMSEL), NINES RODRIGUEZ.

"They're playing chicken with you, Roderick. The best thing to do is stand your ground. You're not in the jungle, so don't show them any fear. Or it'll get worse. It will, you know; that's fact; that's a one-hundred-percent; that's an absolute, sure thing." Her feet slid back into neat black shoes. "Listen: new instructions. You're going to wait for her to contact you again. You're going to explain to her in your most pleasant voice that Mr. LaCroix will attend to this matter the moment his schedule permits. And then you are going to hang up the phone and ignore her. Do you understand me? Do you see what I mean?"

She was just about to pick the next page out of her stack when a rap hit the door.

"Ms. Woeburne," Joelle called through. Red lapels hollered through three inches of viewing glass. Her tease was insultingly chipper, and swooped every vowel. S.W. suspected the strawberry poof probably wasn't French. "Everything is ready for you now! Come downstairs to the lobby and pick up your things when you like."

And just like that, in the space of a simper and knock, every stitch of her impatience was back.

"Do what you see fit," she told Roderick, then hung up the phone.

With a great deal to do and little reason to stay, Ms. Woeburne stood, rolled her neck, gathered the few sparse belongings she carried and left. There was stillness again behind her. The papers marked THREATS cut back together and disappeared with a mean, disciplinarian snap.

She was sharp as a tack, as they say.

And it's true that Ms. Woeburne was a bombardier-type. The whole truth, though, is a little less sure than a tidy john hancock and telephone call. Because—if you are going to do business in the West—you'll have to know this: Ventrue are nasty little caltrops. They act fast and they think faster, which means that no matter how reliable your good soldier is, it's not safe, you know. To scatter tacks. To unbox them and let them just lie around.

So if you've got a tack in your hand, just lying there, you had better use it. You'd better have an eye to stick it in.


	9. Sharp Tacks

_For S.W._

 

Your mail from the past three days (16/1-18/1) was diverted to the front desk, where it has been held in anticipation of your arrival. Please find it enclosed.

Additionally, a list of documentation requests I have received regarding the de Luca Report is included. The Primogen have been informed that you will heretofore field all questions and concerns pertaining to this case. Please submit any files bound for the Primogen to Joelle; in order to ensure no sensitive information is tampered with, I have asked her to hand-deliver them personally.

There is one other update. Regarding interference:

It has been brought to my attention by our Theory & Tactics Department that a parcel containing compromising information about an enemy venture is scheduled for drop-off next month. My operatives have identified the transfer point as the mailbox of a condemned condominium complex. This intelligence could be extremely beneficial to our organization, so you will make the pick-up instead.

Obviously, this is a task that demands an agent I trust. Be advised: You are handling a highly sensitive parcel that should not be viewed in the absence of Theory & Tactics clearance. You do not have clearance.

Address attached. I have been informed that the facility is unguarded, and we have every reason to expect this will be a clean and painless extraction. A floor plan and assortment of satellite photographs provided by the department are included for your convenience. Finally, please find the enclosed mailbox key.

To avoid a legally awkward incident, it is vital you retrieve the package on 13/2 between 10:00-11:30 P.M.

Given your usual role, I understand you may find this assignment unorthodox. Regrets.

All future correspondence will be forwarded directly to your office. I hope you have settled in comfortably.

Again, welcome to Los Angeles.

Regards,

 

SL

 

* * *

 

 **TO: SEBASTIAN LACROIX**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE: JANUARY 20, 2010 5:08 AM**  
**SUBJECT: UNORTHODOXY**

 

Mr. LaCroix:

I’m on top of it.

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
HENDON ESTATES


	10. Hatcheteer

If you know the Anarch movement, and you know its current difficulties, you should know this about Nines Rodriguez: he is always sort of expecting to die.

If you want to exist near conquerors, an inconvenient voice has two choices. You either

  1. Make yourself so small, so similar, that the hawks cannot recognize you, or
  2. You get so big the birds won't land for fear of having their feathers ripped out.



Nines Rodriguez has a good head on his shoulders—his forerunners always told him so—but the Brujah have never been real great at being small.

Brujah: This blue hair die-fast sons of anarchy shit is not who they are. At the heart of the Brujah is the real thing, las brujas, the dangerous women. You will find them in all protests, right back to the heretics and the malificum. Pyres in the night, pitchforks in the trees, grilled bones and minor demons. El cadejo, the dark dog. Black magic, baby's blood. Old, old curses, the kind of hate that unbricks castles and unfences fields and cooks constables to feed starved children, because no curse is older than hunger. The language of revolt is not masculine. It's always been mothers and sisters and she-devils—witches—those people who over-and-over the world has done the most wrong.

You find a lot of mouthy kids today want to disown that witch heritage. They say I'm a _true_ Brujah. It's the stupidest horseshit Nines has ever heard. He resents his people in the way contempt for your lessers always comes with control. But despite that, and despite his sad little role here—despite being just whatever they had leftover at the end of a long march—Nines can most of the time still have a little sympathy for them _._ Not a ton; just enough to _tsk_ , click his tongue on the back of his teeth and say _poor thing, what a pity_.

You know, some people say Troile gave the "true" Brujah exactly what he deserved.

Baron LA has never demanded anyone call him Baron. He's a Baron nonetheless—something that won't change because Sebastian LaCroix and a council of shriveling Primogen signed on the dotted line. They're beginning to sharpen their pikes behind the boardroom doors. _Let 'em_ has always been Nines's public philosophy on these people, because nobody likes a coward. And anyway, there's no keeping them from it. But until then, he digs in, and he expects the witch-hunt to come.

This time it almost-happened on I-10. There were thunderheads clouding up his rearview, a flatbed full of ammunition behind him. There was a weird stormy smell in the beach air, smogging out a bone-yellow February moon. Even Rodriguez's phone went dead. Downtown pushed along beneath the ongoing blackness where sky met street.

For another fifteen minutes, anyway.

Baron LA had become an aporetic and unpoetic thinker, but when The Angels weren't screaming bloody murder in his ears, which happened most of the time, this city could be all right. Windows rolled halfway, oceanwater wind in your lungs; a man could almost forget the other cities. That's the West, Young Man. It's not built up on swamp or on rock, but on Gold Rush possibility, a kind of sand that doesn't crumble when you stomp real hard. It's all conifers here, honest-to-God Pacific. And when it's late and quiet and just-about warm, you can shelve Chicago, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, Indianapolis, Cincinnati. You can put away the miles you lost to the legionnaires.

These big city dreams don't last. Rodriguez knows that better than most. There is always some bird out there bigger and meaner than you.

Nines glanced for a watch he hadn't worn; flinty moonlight just splintered on a vambrace. It was about eleven. He'd come from a meeting in Hollywood, which went how it always went. Isaac talks big game about preserving the Anarch State; Nines puts on his best snake-eating face and says _uh-huh mm-hm but what have you done for us lately?;_ there is a financial exchange. Movie bucks loaded in a false-name bank account translates to paid-off real estate fees and locked-away places to hide their arsenal. This is the best they will get from the Toreador. Everyone knew Abrams would eventually collapse when the Camarilla hammer really came down.

Rodriguez would've tried for a bigger check, but an accomplice from San Fran had buzzed halfway through tonight's little mano-a-mano; _ASAP_ , the message read; _check the cache_. He'd been waiting two months now for Kuei-jin intel. Two months of silence was long enough to presume your spy croaked. He had to check it out. In hindsight, would've been smarter to send someone, but Rodriguez didn't trust enough people. One month and some change days since de Luca died, only one Nocturne conference, and no one had shot at him yet.

You want to survive in the snakepit, you can not make the mistake of believing your lie. You are not the biggest king that ever sat upon this hill. He's a witch's son, so he knows there is always some dark machine hulking up, gaining ground, readying the siege, closing the distance. One day, that far-off machinery is going to bulldoze you and your hill.

But sometimes Nines Rodriguez forgets, for a second, to expect that any old minute is maybe the minute he gets fried.

It should've been stillwater tonight. This drop point had always been a deadzone. Unused apartment box wedged in a nasty neighborhood, _Sunnyside Condos_. Unfunny joke. One day the Ventrue would figure out that high-security deliveries draw moths to flame—and on that day, he'd worry—but for now, unlocked boxes are the best way to hide from black ties.

Hell, the exit was barely sixty seconds away.

So no. On that night, at that moment, on that road, what-ifing and philosophizing, Nines was not at all expecting to die.

Imagine his mood, then: when a dreary gray car hopped the next lane and exploded into the door.

"SHHH—" was about all the Brujah got out before his front tire connected with median, and everything took a mad lurch sideaways.

 

* * *

 

Ms. Woeburne did, too.

Lurch, that is, when the right side of her ugly rental gave a predictable and distinctive _bang_.

Because that's exactly what it sounded like. Not flashy. Maybe even understated: _bang._

The truck went reeling.

You might be interested in hearing the full story.

I mean, you'd be at pretty serious disadvantage, wouldn't you, if you stopped right here. Two conflicting stories are better than an incomplete one, but the resultant confabulation is not exactly kosher. It's confusing to shift gears mid-story, granted. Not what you'd call good reporting. But sometimes you'll just need to break form and do it.

And keep in mind, as you do, that it is significantly more difficult following the opening speaker in a debate than opening it yourself—because the formerly objective audience now has their head full of spiel they'll need to unlearn. It's not _your_ fault, strictly speaking. Anyone would be misled if they spent too much time letting the underdog dramatize at them. But it would be irresponsible not extrapolate from a different angle, because the difficult thing about truth is that even when someone thinks they're telling it, they can't give it to you in full.

Ms. Woeburne, likewise, can't three-hundred-and-sixty-degree—but nevertheless, someone trying to make a politicized decision should probably hear from the other side.

Well, here is where she's at.

Like it or not, as a matter-of-fact: her two hands strangling the steering wheel, her shoulders deep into the polyester, her eyelids peeled. Two wheels, too, squealing wildly on the front axle of her car. The impact and the ricochet tossed her fender away. Her car slammed off the enemy truck, which had slammed over the lane divider, leaving Ms. Woeburne bouncing scot-free like the luckier end of a Newton's cradle, parts howling precariously down this stretch of unlucky street.

She did not scream. Nope. Not even a little one.

S.W. actually shut her eyes when the pickup bounced, spun into another lane (where it was hit by two more cars), then flipped underside-up to disappear over the median, showering sparks and screeching the awful screech of ruined metal.

Doubt her side of this all you want; that's your prerogative; she can't keep you from it. But, just in case, and for your consideration: one tire came about twelve inches from bursting glass out of her passenger window.

To remind you: she is not secret police.

She is not a card-carrying member of the Scourge. She is a clerk who sits heels-touching in a Tower office or cross-legged on her suite's uncomfortable leather couch and reads transcripts. She hellos prickly hellos at Joelle and lifts up her eyebrows at impertinent remarks. She signs things, shakes hands, oversees the mooks in Sebastian's censorship department. She never met the Primogen. She is a loyalist who just spent twenty measly, dreary, foggy nights shut alone inside a cubicle, where she was not visible. S. M. Woeburne is a Caligula houseplant. She is watching eyes, canned vote, waiting pen.

She wasn't expecting it, either. At least, the "it" she was expecting did not include running headlong into interference at a six-point intersection midway through what we'll call a light errand. A small pick-up task on her way to the office tonight. Largely unimportant, you might assume, because it was S.W. doing the footwork—steadfast S.W., who was not especially handy in a fight—Foreman S.W., whose reaction-chain was to startle first, shoot second, ask later. There was no subscript to this order. She needed only be sure to get it done within the next forty-five minutes. There had not even been a meeting about it. Someone placed the memo on her small public desk, right in plain view, atop the neat box labeled INCOMING.

 _For S.W._ : fetch this, please, would you; be subtle; much thanks, kind regards.

Unorthodox, sure. But a touch of unorthodoxy isn't terribly unusual when you work for a blood-drinking eldritch horror. Once Sebastian had even asked her to pickpocket someone else's weekly dues from a Harpy's book-keeper. She said _yes-sir_ then, too. Of course she was going to say it now.

These are the sorts of sticky, sock-feet tasks a corporal expects. But she was not about to play hot-potato with enemy correspondence. Our soldier had started tonight like every other: she tucked her keys next to her pistol, loaded and locked; she closed the highest button on her jacket; she combed straight her short, dark hair.

So please understand that if had there been any palatable way to convince herself the vehicle that just switched its blinkers _left-turn_ did not belong on the page _THREAT LEVEL - RED_ , then Ms. Woeburne would have nabbed it. You may not know her. But you must know that.

They clearly must've found out somehow. They must have known. This was exactly what happened to Victor de Luca: torched into an oily crisp. She was not about to stop this car, step out, and stomp straight into a casualty list. She'd clenched ten fingers around the wheel. She'd thought about it.

Ms. Woeburne was not like Victor de Luca. Ms. Woeburne had a career in front of her.

She proofed and processed. She navigated two lanes. She checked her seatbelt. She flicked away a grim piece of hair and stonily committed to what was – until that point, anyway – probably the most executive thing she could've done.

She smashed her toe into the gas pedal and banked hard right.

It sounded like an explosion, anyway.

Wreckage: at her, then behind her, like _whoosh_! Once she was far enough from the point of impact, the Ventrue craned to assess, standing on the mud carpet, shock stonewalling anything else. She could not see the driver. Two nearby vehicles had failed to flag and crashed nose-first into one another, spilling alloys and plastics over the interstate. One motorcycle had been totaled by a snapped door. Wheels were jutting skywards in awkward, gory angles. Ammunition broke out of the truckbed and went flying everywhere.

 _'Killed,'_ Ms. Woeburne decided, cotton-mouthed, smacking her lips. Her fingers were paralyzed; she could not have pried them free if she tried. _'Neutralized,'_ a voice suggested—a better, less visceral word.

There was a fierce, fender-sized dent slammed one foot into her bleak car.

The Foreman squeaked just short of sandwiching a family SUV. Her fists white-knuckled the steering wheel.

A crowd was growing. S.W., absorbing the fallback, slowed down to fumble, to remember her parts. She had a cellphone in here somewhere. Was her nose bleeding? There were these little rusty blotches on her blouse, her thumbs, her khaki pants. She must have bashed it on something. Funny; she couldn't remember doing that. It must've hurt. You'd think bonking your face into a steering wheel would be memorable. Whiplash? There was a distinct static swirl through the nerves at the base of her skull. There was also a large wobble where one of her tires ruptured. It made the Volvo hop like a sad Igor; it clacked the teeth inside Ms. Woeburne's head.

"Damn it," she said, and then, because there was nobody else to interrupt her, she said it again. "Damn it. Please. Where did it go."

The tightness of her hands made it difficult, once she'd found her phone, to tap the right numbers. Or maybe it was the way her wrists were shaking. The stereo kept on with evening news, and the Foreman's watch kept clacking over the bone. Easily a couple blocks ahead of the collision now and nothing seemed to be moving anymore. Why did they make these buttons so small? The Ventrue was only dimly aware of who she ought to be calling, but had a stronger sense, always, of who she was supposed to be.

" _You are being hysterical,"_ Mr. LaCroix would've observed—and then she saw a version of herself sitting beside her, a little more hardhearted, a little grayer, in the passenger's seat. The harder Ms. Woeburne frowned and with her Sire's voice said: _"What do you want me to tell you? Natural selection?"_

S.W. seriously considered bailing out of the disaster and dashing up this freeway on foot. She couldn't _sit_ here; she had to _do_ something. No Ventrue compromises her organization by being convicted for a hit-and-run.

The other version of herself—before it vanished—blinked twice and said _understand where you are_.

Ms. Woeburne stopped, sobered, sniffed, stuffed a nostril with a dashboard tissue, recollected herself, and smoothed her hackles into something resembling sanity. It was with shark eyes that she took all of this apart.

The temperature was ten degrees from chilly. Slight, invariable breeze. Three squad cars led an ambulance towards the crash-site some distance behind her; a man was carrying armfuls of towels; one striped semi came rumbling in, decelerating slowly, from the opposite direction.

"Well," she said, wobbly, and breathed out.

Without criticizing what her body was doing, Ms. Woeburne stood through the moon-roof with pistol-in-hand.

There. Now that you are caught up and come round to where you started: Step back to where Nines was telling you about somebody's top-down logic trying to break witches apart.

 

* * *

 

He fell palms-and-knees out of the open wound that used to be a passenger door.

The Baron was blinking dully. The blacktop was torched. It burned him, but who cares; everything felt like a stick fire in a stone oven. Cement pebbles and bits of scrap scattered the roadside. Yellow tracks right up in his face.

He looked right. He looked left.

Rodriguez's left sleeve was fierce, unsanitary crimson. Color like thick wet paint. Shattered glass wrote weird, furious shapes into one of his forearms; char marks and blood blossoms. He could smell the singe of clothing. Gasoline scorched were it got in through the pores of his skin. People hollering, weakly, then loudly, from somewhere way out east, where he couldn't see so good right now. A significant piece of truck was laying yards away from its chassis, thrown across the highway. Red dripped into the space where both his hands pressed the tarmac. _Nose? Mouth? Scalp? What?_ He couldn't tell because his fingers were dead. Whatever it was stung. The windshield went through him, all he fucking knew, and Nines didn't check only because his limbs were throbbing just about as badly.

The Anarch pawed at his throat, at his breastbone, expecting Swiss cheese, feeling nothing. One hand popped his dislocated jaw back into place without even thinking about it.

Having figured out he wasn't immediately about to die, wondering if it was safe to stand up, Baron LA now fixed upon two important questions: _1\. What the fuck just happened?_ and _2\. What the fuck was that?_

Politics aside—ten years later or maybe two—wherever it started and whoever'd finish it—you can get them to agree on one thing: It's a stupid-ass vampire who thinks things just happen, boom, no reason at all.

Shock turned up fast. It muted the couple dozen kine buzzarding around, ignored the Good Samaritan construction worker who'd leapt that smashed up median to drag away survivors. Benevolent idiot flipped over three parched carcasses before finding Nines. Two big gloved fists had him by the shirt without a word. Man pulled him up by the scruff—maybe not the smartest move—but Rodriguez's guts stayed in place and his ears were ringing too loudly to say no. He couldn't really react when the guy jammed one shoulder beneath his blood-soaked arm, either, and put the hundred-year-old Brujah up right.

He managed to stand on his own with a little push. The sudden crispness of breeze was surprising up here. Palm trees—over all this mess, it still smelled like boomtown California—and it would've been funny, except for the underdraft of roasted meat. One foot under the other. He staggered, was steadied, and it was only when nobody held him up anymore that the Baron realized he _had_ been leaning on the guy. His right knee wouldn't lock like it should. Wasn't there a wallet in that pocket? Hadn't there just been something to do?

Had this leatherworks taste in his mouth. Rodriguez stayed up; then it was someone else's thumb pointing him towards the curb, where a company van sat, open and waiting for triage. Giant orange debris-crusher. There was a smear of cyclist lying somewhere back there. Nines fumbled dumbly for his handguns and located all three, not that either hand knew what to do right now. No one fired off any shots.

The human was talking at him. Looked kind of like this hatchetman him and Chester used to run through Springfield with. He had only distant awareness of what was being said. " _You're alright, man. – Snapped it, that's all. Going to be fine. – You'll be O.K,"_ the construction guy kept repeating. He couldn't answer. Then words themselves went weird—turned into something that man couldn't have been saying, but that the Brujah heard, clear as the real time he heard it. _Hey, buddy-boy, I'm talking to you. What's your name, sugar? Speakuh the English? You got a tongue in your mouth?_ Nines said I can't hear anything and didn't hear himself say it, either. Then he was redirected, turned around and pointed at the letters on that van: Somebody AND SONS.

He looked down and walked. His arm was bent in a way it should not have been able to. But he had to keep moving; had to figure out what happened; had to get off the street, at least, limping for AND SONS. Headlights flashed everywhere around him and everyone else. His mind was spinning in circles. Baron LA—who was no more _Baron LA_ than the next guy right at this second—dazedly reached the shoulder, trying not to attract attention, good arm tucked protectively around his middle. The right one was busted, he knew, alongside what felt like an ankle and a side. It was all a general, hazy hurt.

He sat heavily on the bumper of the empty van and tried to make his mind tick straight again.

It wouldn't work just because Nines asked it to. He had to come back to himself—but he felt something coming up, too—and, thinking he was about to puke, the Baron leant to the side and turned his head away.

At the end of the wreck: a little gray car.

And, if his brain wasn't playing tricks on him: a little series of gunshots. Pop-pop, one-two.

A series of events:

The truck driver's forehead thunked down on the wheel. A lifeless hand spilled coffee from its holder. The oncoming eighteen-wheeler stuttered a handful of yards, tentative in its newfound freedom; the speed built gradually; then, quite without warning, the front axle foundered, and the oblong abdomen swung around to careen lamely down the highway.

All of five minutes. Maybe seven, if you counted the collision itself.

And there was Nines Rodriguez bowing with his hands on his knees against the side of an AND SONS van, dumping someone's water bottle over his stinging neck, trying to wake himself up.

He looked up through the dripping of his hair and maybe—if he'd had his wits about him, and if it hadn't been for the overloaded truck shaving the street—he'd have noticed there was somebody inside that little gray car.

This is not my day, Nines thought. Then he fell, leaving the rest of them, on his side, under the van, and through that closing gap of floorboard and sky.

By the time the truck had settled down the razed stretch of a road, the hatchet and her nosebleed were a mile away.


	11. Wolves at the Door

When the Baron limped home that night, Jack laughed in his face.

"Take a shot at this son-of-a-bitch," crowed One Old Brujah from his seat at The Last Round bar.

The Anarch's exhaust-heavy fingernails curled around the coffee cup of blood he held, and despite how he'd shouted it out, Smiling Jack looked happy as a clam. Purple lips pared back to frightening teeth—obvious teeth, wolverine teeth, yellow with time. There was something triumphant in what he said: _take a shot_. Rodriguez ignored him.

Two steps past the withering green door, and there hadn't been any panic. There hadn't been anything at all, except Jack—who opened his mouth to laugh and laugh and laugh that infamous rat-a-tat laugh.

"Look here at what we got, kiddos. Been a long old while since I seen a Baron looking quite this low, Captain Kidd."

The speechless mid-week crowd watched said Baron drag the pieces of himself in, trying to be discreet, blood sticking his sock to his shoe. His senior watched him enter without rising from the bar stool. Coyote eyes, crinkled now—he got a giggle in.

"One time. Not now," Nines tried.

"Oh, boyo. It's going to have to be now. We got no other time! So limp that sad self of yours right on in, and while you're busy being sad, why don't you tell old Jack the scoop. What exactly is going on here, Rodriguez. Somebody mistake you for a pincushion? Somebody setting off fireworks in the hood of your car? Sad, sad, sad it is, bucko. Fact, I ain't had somebody who professed to be a Baron come crawling into my sight looking so sad-and-sorry in a fat minute."

He's a funny old goat, Smilin' Jack. The rumors were outrageous and too many. Some said Calico Jack for the nickname; some said Blackbeard by the way he'd twist the singed one he wore. Nines didn't care which way it was. Reality was here. It tore a crumbling cigar out of its mouth, shook embers onto the hardwood and stomped them out. It jingled like spurs when it walked and it was usually having a good time.

The kids all grinned and enjoyed his attention whenever they got it. They didn't catch the contempt in how this black sheep laughed at the Baron bleeding in a doorway.

"Not so sad since San Fran, at least. Oh, wait," he remembered. "That wasn't you. You weren't there. Hah-hah-hah! _Now_ I remember."

Rodriguez was not laughing.

That's probably why Jack did this shit so often. Nobody else had the accumulated cred to dismiss a Baron's orders like a bee off a peach. But Jack's not-liked Nines Rodriguez since he first heard that name from a kid down in Tijuana, 1980s, who had a magnum in her pocket and a car full of dirty PCP. She said Nines Rodriguez, yeah, that's my boy, my brother. He's the boss.

"What the holy fuck." Skelter couldn't get it out fast enough.

"What in Saint Barbara's sweet name happened to you, Boy Wonder?" Jack wanted to know. There were cuts crisscrossing Nines and a crunch of glass powder stuck in his shirt, dusting the dark run of blood where an arm broke. He had a burn on his thigh and it glued down the denim. A laceration, a scorch, and a loud blood bruise on the left side of his neck—maybe an imprint of driver's seat, where it landed when everything lurched. It is upsetting to see your boss, your brother hurt; it is not encouraging to hear that same brother, whom some had call a last stand, referred to as _boy_. "You lose a sumo match to a monster truck?"

"Kind of. Semi," Nines gritted. He was favoring his worse leg—couldn't be helped—and eased himself slowly into a corner booth, careful not to distress the tenderly healed arm. It still hurt, even after the bone'd started sorting itself. He wore a blackened eye and a banged knee. He sucked air at an unexpected pang that ricocheted up his femur and scattered at the Brujah's hipbone.

Jack's palm heel smacked into the bar top. Tumblers went rolling. He howled.

The wounded Baron blocked it out. He was too tired to knock heads for dumb reasons. Rodriguez took great relief in this piece-of-shit Elysium, and on cue, the pain began to ease—his body's reward for finally finding a safe place to sit down. He would've liked to sprawl back across the bench and sleep.

"What the fuck," Skelter said again, and he'd leant forward like a bomb dog, just got a whiff of something. Nines did not look at him. He wasn't going to do what he wanted and lie down. "What the hell. Who in the hell. You better explain. You better tell me exactly what happened."

The Baron was sharper than he meant. His jaw was hitched and his teeth stung. "Can you give me a minute to be?"

Nines saw no reason that one stupid night gone to shit on a highway should bring about the uncomfortable realization of how easy martyrs are made. It is too close in the Angels for revenge; their elbows are hemmed in too tight to let a pissed-off child subtract the first tooth from a Camarilla smirk or a Kuei-jin sneer. Everyone has to keep their heads.

In an attempt to compensate for his appearance, Nines put on the most unaffected face he could manage and pretended his hollering ribcage didn't feel like it was just triple salchowed by a goddamn wrecking ball. He'd been lucky to make it in here without another disaster. No aftershocks; no agent tail-gaiting him home. A Baron has too much opposition and too little belief in chance to buy into accidents anymore.

And evidently he wasn't alone in that suspicion, because the only phrase to describe Damsel coming down the stairs was "freight train."

Nines figured it hurt being head-over-heels beneath a lilting eighteen-wheeler, asphalt going to hell on him, friction burns all up and down his arms. He found it pretty painful when his temple splintered the windshield few moments before, speckling nose blood on car plastic. And yes, there'd been a little pinch when the steering wheel crumpled forward and gave his captive arm a greasy, wishbone _snap._

Turns out, "hurt" was actually when their Den Mother cannonballed into him—and, in wrenching his smashed limb straight, landed her fist directly on the big second-degree scorched into his thigh.

The Baron barked like a bricked Rottweiler. Smiling Jack just about choked up a lung.

"DAMSEL," Nines belted, world sweltering white, something he'd meant to sound furious hitting fresh air in a yelp. Pain went super-nova behind his eyelids. He couldn't swallow the next yelp, either, when she gave his arm a wicked twist, forcing radius and ulna back into position. It was a necessary and hideous series of sounds.

There was a core of nausea radiating from the hollow inside. His mouth felt foamy. He almost did lie down.

"What the fuck happened to you!" she hollered, more accusation than question, a distinction that was a little hard to care about when you'd just had your shoulder manhandled into place. Damsel was standing in front of him with arms crossed, a smudge of color caught in the bar glass glow. Windows, cheap wood, cherry red; everything teetered for a moment. There might've been a fracture in his collarbone somewhere.

Nines didn't particular want to discuss it right now. He grabbed his ribcage, looked dismally at his twisted arm and let out some air.

Pretty obvious to everyone how and why Red had landed the Den Mother title. Nobody challenged her, though—either because most locals these nights didn't need mommying, or because the rest were even younger than she was. All that said, Damsel wore the old rank best under stress; she was by nature more a drill sergeant than a mama bear, and although you couldn't talk to her without being screamed at on a regular day, that nasty temper made for someone who could quickly count casualties then make the calls. Someday, maybe. Someday in the future she might have been right for this job.

Having fixed the most obvious problem, Damsel pushed her dumb beret back, squinting. Because it was hard to see in their smoky den, she boosted up on her tippy-toes, grabbing the overhead lampshade and flinging the light right in Nines's face. He winced unhappily and shoved her away with his good arm.

"Did you go to Hallowbrook? Did you fuck up your knee?" she threatened. "I told you to wait on San Fran. I told you to wear a fucking vest if you're going to go stomping around by yourself. I told you—"

Nines did his best to swat Damsel's mitts away.

"Knock it off," he snarled. She ducked a clumsy swipe. The pain was getting to him; there'd been serious disquiet in the way Baron LA had—just for a second—showed his teeth like a dog. "Just back the fuck down. Give me some air."

Red fidgeted, scowling, deciding not to disobey a direct order. For now, the kid gave herself a job. A sloppy tool-box full of first-aid had found its way out of the storage cabinets beneath their bar and into her short, stout hands. She plopped it noisily on the table and rifled through hardware masquerading as surgeon's tools.

"I told you," Damsel said, and kept saying—what she always did—whether she'd honestly _said_ or not. "I told you it was only a matter of time."

Skelter, having regained a little life in his cheeks, eyed the young Den Mother resentfully. "Strictly speaking," he snorted; when those two spoke, it was always in these sorts of grim, spiny, hacked-off sounds. " _I_ told him. You told me I was wasting his time. And, that in mind, I'm going to repeat myself: what the hell happened?"

Nines sort of hoped he might lapse into shock again. Damsel had been about two seconds from upturning a bottle over his bloodied forearm as though it might help anything but the terror she was always holding back.

He shoved her off. Droplets flung everywhere, a big backward arc, like spraying champagne; whatever she'd almost poured bubbled in a peroxide way. Skelter waited. Neither of them were exactly sure for what.

"I'm going to be blunt with all of you," he told them. Nobody spoke. There was a modest group tonight—four or five newer kids—none of them soldiers who especially stuck out. Damsel could tell you their names. Nines knew the faces, but after a year—after a half-dozen of those children don't make it—the lines will start to fizzle out. Somebody stood up in the back room and shuffled to peer at him across their empty bar. The Baron tried not to see who. "I don't really know what this was. Wasn't halfway from Hollywood; came the fuck out of nowhere. I'd just met Abrams, so it's possible somebody tailed me out. But again, I don't know."

"Fuck the Toreador," Damsel jabbed, slamming a buckle on that box shut. She had a thick square of gauze in one hand. "Fuck Abrams; if he'd put down the damn soldiers, stop being scared shitless of the Ventrue, none of this shit would happen. But what the fuck am I saying? Security—in Hollywood? That'll happen. That's a big joke. Fuck Hollywood."

Skelter didn't bother shooting her the glare he'd kept bottled up. "And you were coming straight back here. I'm understanding that right?"

"Sort of. I was going to Sunnyside, but nobody's wise on that." Nines winced. He couldn't tell at this point if it was because something ached or because he just remembered that tonight probably constituted another loss. "Nobody _was_ , anyway. Guess I can't say that no more. A scout paged me forty-five, maybe fifty minutes before; one of our San Fran people, up in Bakersfield right now. You know him, Skelter. Goes by Atlantic. Decent kid. Been monitoring this slimy Cam ghoul who operates out of an apartment near Mercy Hospital."

"Mercurio. I know that weedy fuck. Saw him pissing around by Gabe's few months ago." Skelter's molars clenched; the tendons twitched. His eyes were thin and dubiously bronze. This was a familiar expression, one Nines himself wore many times; it went something like _should have killed him when I had the chance_. Should've/could've/would've. " _He_ do this to you?"

The Baron grimaced when a bony pang irked his shoulder again. The nerves were waking back up, so he bit his tongue, sacrificing it as a distraction from the more important places that hurt. "I don't know. Doubt it, but it's possible. Would help if I knew what the hell that kid tried to pass on; circumstances being what they were, I didn't make the pick-up. Our San Fran people can re-drop if it's worth it since Sunnyside's dead to us now. Anyway, even if it's not: I still think it's unlikely that Camarilla fuck had the clearance for an assassination. I took measures not to associate myself with Atlantic while he's working. Shit, I've never been in the room with him—couldn't pick his face out of a crowd. Safe as safe can be. But this was not bad luck. This was not a shot in the dark at me."

"Set-up?" Skelter had a dark temperament and a predisposition to see traitors in every sunspot on his eye.

"Don't think so. That Board got bold enough to order a hit on me in the middle of the road, I'd be deader. Doesn't fit LaCroix's profile. Car crashes are sloppy. Not his style."

"You don't think Isaac…"

"No," Rodriguez ruffed, and the glare of it shut that particular sunspot down.

Kent-Alan, downtown's misfit marksman, stuck his badly-bleached mop of hair outside their front door. The Toreador's eyes were an old rust color and registered growing disappointment. "Hey," he noticed. It was an offhand and unassuming voice, insufferable during the long hours, upbeat on terrible nights. "You forget something? I don't see the…"

"Who the fuck cares," Damsel was already yelling. Skelter looked steamed. Nines had to will down the fingers going to plug up his ears. "How the fuck do you even think about that, and how dare you start this shit now. Who in this whole fucking world—"

"Tell me you're kidding!" A wiry palm slapped the kid's forehead, hitting with knuckles and watch. "You killed Bonnie? Come _on_ , folks! I'm not a wheels warehouse, here. I'm not a rental service. I just picked that one up. The driver was extra rude, too. Almost put one between my eyes. And you speed her right out and get run over. WHAM-O." K-Al wore a beat-up, secondhand sports jacket that looked more like greaser leather than the corduroy it used to be. Its scuffed shoulders leapt to the diamonds in his earlobes—then, at Rodriguez's irritated look, plummeted. He had a Swiss army knife in that coat and a fake LAPD sticker he used to jack cars. "This is a sad day. How are we going to move all Bernardino's heavy ordinance next week? And you just abandoned her out on the field, too? Must think I am _made_ of GTAs. Tragic as hell!"

"Don't know what to tell you, honey."

Kent closed the door, slogging back with fingers in his pockets and chin bobbing like a dopey chicken. Threadbare Rocket Dogs clapped the floorboards dejectedly; they were orange as a Florida peel. "Poor old girl," he sighed, Cali-kid exterior with a melodrama bent. He liked to be called Playboy and the runt's own bloodline was his best running joke. "Should have left you with that redneck in the Arizona plates."

 _Playboy_ —please. Screw-loose beach burnout was here because he never could slide into Isaac's world of white-collar glitz; his blood was closer to Brujah red than artiste gold; and an Anarch haven in duress takes the wild cards it gets tossed. With that long-legged, ambling stroll and rail-drifter's ease, Kent Alan said he was a lady-killer, said he was to revolvers what Jackson Pollock was to finger-paint. You didn't get it and the results look too easy to be real talent, but that's OK. Nines needed a deputy. Shame the cheerful brat couldn't close his damn mouth.

Damsel's upper lip flinched. "Shut the fuck up, K-Al. There's nothing funny about this."

One of the Toreador's lanky hands rapped his breastbone like a pledge. Kent apologized without apologizing, fighting down a shit-eating grin. "Sorry, Momma."

Playboy was pretty damn lucky his Den Mother didn't trouble herself to get up.

"Can I continue, please? I'm not going to talk over this shit." The impatience was stiff and hackled in Rodriguez's voice. Nines waited for the bickering to stop, and then he waited a few seconds longer, just to be sure. The wolves watched him wait.

"What's important now: finding out who. I didn't I.D. a thing. Punched right over the median and into traffic. Big goddamn pile-up; truck flipped over; just about turned me into a smear. It was a pretty good-sized vehicle. SUV, I think. Or close-to," the Anarch mumbled, cringing with the absurdity of that image. There was a damage report to slap on Prince LaCroix's desk: Baron knocked clean by a speeding soccer mom. Nines needed a drink and he didn't care what it was. "I can't answer anything else until we take care of that question. Besides, I didn't have a lot of time to go poking around. But I think somebody shot that trucker. Skelter, any way we can get video of this? Street cameras, choppers, police radio—that sort of thing?"

A thoughtful frown dented the tough-luck face; all in all, they'd said very little since their Baron came through the door. He nodded. "Doughie used to be a cop. I'll give him a call; maybe he can pull traffic footage."

"You do that. One of you contact Atlantic and warn him his cover's probably blown. Meanwhile, I'm going to get Isaac on the phone, see if he knows anything about this mess. The Nosferatu can probably wrap their claws around some—"

" _Girl_ —" Nines warned. Damsel, who'd been creeping up with a handful of wet napkin, retreated in a way that made him think the war was already on.

When Jack rejoined their conversation, there were tears in his eyes—salty, sneering, scouts'-honor tears. Skelter passed him for the upstairs telephone, and you could hear a pistol in his pocket. His rifle was hanging off a coat nail tacked into a back wall.

"Wait, wait," Maybe-Blackbeard reeled, a hand heel on his forehead, trying to pin down the creases there. He wasn't trying hard enough. His grin was full of long cuspids, dingy with tobacco and four-hundred years. Jack didn't get up off the bar stool. He sat there, and it was funny how the muzzle of Skelter's gun drew a line of sight past him, to the bell on their front door. "Hold up a minute here. Let me get this shit straight. You get your ass kicked by a fuckin'—" The Brujah's Adam's apple wobbled with laughter. "—by a fuckin' _SUV_ , and best of all, you just got a 'feeling' this is some kind of Grand Ol' Party scheme? Who says we're dealing with an ambush at all? Maybe some Malk fell asleep at the freakin' wheel, took a headlong ticket into your passenger door. Hah-hah-hah! Sports Yoo-tility Vee-hicle! This is the best goddamn day of my year."

Old Man Anarch got a brief look at a Baron's middle finger.

"Why don't you fuck off, Jack?" Damsel's nose was wrinkled, arrowheads livid green and drawn wherever she looked. The fistful of bandages was pointing at his face. "Seriously! Why don't you just get the fuck up and leave. Cause if you're gonna sit there on your hands and crack wise, what use do I have for you? What use do I have for some musty-ass geezer loafing around, wasting space and cleaning out my goddamn freezers? I mean, Jesus. If you're going to just fucking laugh. If this is some source of amusement for you—" Aggression shuddered her shoulders. "God! I get so fucking sick of you people. I get so sick of you constantly running your mouth."

You had to give Red credit: she always blurted out exactly what Nines was too smart to say.

"Bah," the lectured Brujah belched out. Sometimes Jack lived for baiting their fire-breathing junior mascot. Others times, he didn't really spare the energy. It was somewhere in the middle tonight. "Like I give a rat's ass what you think, mami. Get those milk-teeth out of my sight before I yank 'em."

Nines grabbed a fistful of the Den Mother's shirt and hoisted her back into his booth before she did something regrettable.

"Look," he said.

"I AM looking. You told me to back the—"

"I'm tired," the Baron snapped.

Damsel had a scowl for him—she usually did—but took another look, and shot it at Kent instead.

"Let me tell you what we're going to do tonight," he stared in, all over again. Rodriguez always spoke a little too low for the room he was in. It was a little manufactured, the drawl a little overplayed, but it made people listen better. Kent-Alan stuffed both hands deeper in his pockets. A first-year kid whose story Nines couldn't recall looked like a ghost about to vanish in the stairwell dark. "Much as it doesn't settle with me, the point is: Jack's not wrong. It could be an organized threat, but then again—maybe not. Until we have a read on this, I want everyone on good behavior, and I'm not just saying it. No fuck-ups until this gets settled or dies down, understand me?"

"You better believe it, sonny. You better play it safe." Jack could not, or would not, will it down. "I hope it's the Cam. I'd like this Cammy."

Smiling Jack was legend—an omen they couldn't beat. But there were times Nines Rodriguez really hated having the rank old bastard around.

It had been a long time coming. A long time coming, but he didn't imagine it'd come quite like this.

"Come on," Baron LA said, sighed, nudged Damsel out of his way, and led to the cellar trapdoor. "Let's find me a vest."


	12. The Lion Paw

When Ms. Woeburne limped into Venture Tower later that night, the Prince terrified her more than any Harpy, paper trail or Boeing ever had before.

He laughed.

The bizarreness of her evening hadn't topped off with smashing a Baron on I-10, but in the events that followed: barren black lobby, abandoned help desk, echoing penthouse floor. The white oak doors at the end of the daunting hall were propped open. Joelle was nowhere to be found. The nothingness of it all seemed unreal. She had been so afraid to climb this tower, so gobsmacked, that S.W. had almost cried in the parking lot, with only the anesthesia of shock keeping her dry.

And, of course, then came her Sire—lancing down the malevolent corridor, pernicious and exigent. Ms. Woeburne had barely stepped out of the elevator. She froze.

The coldness of this place—its mahogany, its perpetual air conditioning, its dinosaur lawfulness—prickled fine hairs up the Foreman's neck. She immediately broke eye contact, because ancillae should defer and because Ms. Woeburne was painfully aware of the dangers in looking Ventrue in their eyes. She focused on the wallpaper. Imperial trefoil, embossed gold. Mr. LaCroix's shoe soles clapped the floor with distinct gunpowder pangs. His face was inscrutable; high edges, fuscilier hues, the kind of sword shapes you must sink into water quickly before they melt. Ms. Woeburne couldn't find anything to say or anywhere to move, and—for one madcap, nightmare instant—she thought the Prince might be coming to kill her.

The Childe felt herself petrify, jaw and ankles locked, a mute tin man with death written all over her reproducible chrome face.

Nobody killed her.

Sebastian cut off what else might've happened with a curt, horseman cluck of his tongue and two cold fingers at her elbow. There were no hellos or handshakes. She stopped like a held colt.

"Ah. Hold, please! I'm not interested in whatever it is," he informed her; only then was she aware her mouth had opened. Ms. Woeburne sucked air in and swallowed. His anger was indeterminate; murderous enthusiasm rattled against the usual layer of brisk, metropolitan calm. And maybe, ruinously: surprise.

"Pause. One moment. Before anything else: you must humor me, Ms. Woeburne," Mr. LaCroix began. The odd hunger laden in the filigree and cardstock of Ventrue buildings congealed her. Architecture for a mood no one had made words for yet. He was still talking. Her heart was a lava rock. "I don't want a monologue. You know I've already heard. The incident report is sitting on my desk, but all the same, I want to hear a 'yes' straight from you. Tell me—simply—did you?"

Ms. Woeburne was stoppered up by the patina of spit in her throat. It went down like cotton balls. "Sir—" Her voice she found stunningly tangible. Had there still been a lung inside of her? Controlling the shaking of her hands was difficult, so S.W. clasped them together sternly behind herself. The Foreman's rigid body had sufficiently prepared itself for disaster. "I did—really—did what I had to. It was an emergency. I never intended an offensive, and I swear that I didn't think—"

But whatever she'd thought was dispatched. Not with a knife, not under a guillotine, not at the end of a pistol—but by a sudden, disorienting, smattering cloudburst of laughter.

He did not wait for a legitimate _yes_. Her fumbling was enough.

Mr. LaCroix laughed himself halfway to happiness.

The Prince's lofty cackles went staccato like a snare-drum. His head whipped back. Each rattle struck Ms. Woeburne's ego in a hail of machinegun fire.

He was laughing. Laughing.

"Dear child! Dear, dear child," Sebastian cried, and the scone-light confused that alien expression reassembling the noble bones behind his unloving face. He looked like a Roman captain who'd descended into madness. "I am _so_ sorry. I owe you an apology. Why I ever doubted your nerve is irrelevant. You are a soldier—soldier ingénue _._ A real Yorkshire bulldog!"

S.W. had never heard the reserved, impatient Prince get so loud unless he was yelling. And she knew surreal that minute: Sebastian seized her arm, half-escorting, half-towing S.W. towards his office. The Foreman's teeth clenched in a thunderstruck, lopsided grimace. She did not feel like a soldier or anyone's dog. She felt like some drooling village idiot who saw mockery, heard tittering, and was subsumed by it: hers was the terror of those who can't quite understand what is happening. It spooked her more than any boorish handshake or side-a-ways comment ever had.

She loped awkwardly along on a snapped-off heel.

There is an idiom that comes in situations like these. But it is a tired idiom, Ms. Woeburne has never liked exaggerating when the barren truth will do. So appreciate that sentiment—and appreciate the dead, papier-mâché look of her face—when you consider this: she was scared out of her _mind_.

That snake-in-the-grass feeling went to absolute squirrels when the door clicked shut behind them. Now Sebastian would scream, for certain. Except he didn't. Actually, his back pressed flat against the wood, and our straight-laced protagonist helplessly watched her Sire slide into what you'd just have to accept was a racket.

Because she did not know what else to do, Ms. Woeburne stepped forward and offered a weak hand. Her whole arm was trembling enough to really be hilarious. Sebastian took his face out of his palms, took one look at old S.W.'s derailed condition, and immediately crumbled again. She would have rather he hollered her straight through the picture windows.

"Well, that's—it's all right. It's no problem. It's going to be taken care of," Mr. LaCroix decided, finally reeling back in. There was pompous authority to the announcement despite the humor still blazing on his face. Verdict made, Prince Los Angeles pushed himself off his door-turned-crutch without accepting her hand and moved, quite purposefully, for the waiting desk. His strict features were made muzzy by the menace of that merriment. Reflex action, he swiped an arm over his brow; there was no sweat to mop.

"Mr. LaCroix," she tried, but that was stamped short, too.

"Joelle." His thumb held the intercom call button; he was smiling distantly. "Ring Mr. Dunn and let him know his term of service has been extended. Tell him Ms. Woeburne is not to leave my cabinet in the foreseeable future. That is all, thank you."

Then the soldier did squeak—a frightful, violent sound—and almost bloodied her bottom lip when Sebastian snatched out, fingers grappling S.W's unforgiving chin, to give her face a muttlike shake. The instinct to pull away was muzzled by leadenness. That stone in her chest had gotten big, become a bulwark. She wanted desperately to feel some paternity in the action; there was nothing furious about it. She should have been radiant, but—given it was still a vampire's hand pressing indentations into her cheeks—Ms. Woeburne was too frightened for herself.

"Dear child," he said again. Was it possible to hear the lack of an _e_? His child tried to bristle free of him—she couldn't help it—she was all cat-in-a-corner, unable to thaw or stay still. He didn't seem to hold that against her. Her hands, after all, were no warmer than his. "What are we to do with you now? What, indeed. I might never have called you here if I expected you were capable of that sort of recklessness. If you asked me, I'd have said you'd rather fall under the train tracks than chance something so extreme. You've upset my baseline assessment of you. So I recommend you enjoy the moment, because this is the best bungle—" He let her go and left no prints behind. "—you will ever commit."

 _Bungle?_ No, not nearly. S.W. felt terrorized.

"Well," she whispered; it was a bit of dander wisping in the air.

"Well, madam." Mr. LaCroix finally sat down, dabbing a corner of handkerchief to the sides of his face. He flung it back without checking for wet spots. The drawer gave a startling scrape. "Please, have a seat. And let me be clear: I am not happy. However—" The freefall of her stomach lurched upwards. She was sitting down, yes, but had no recollection of doing it. "The root of my unhappiness does not begin with you. I can acknowledge that unseen variables sometimes change plans. So: there are logistics we must attend to. Tell me," Sebastian asked. Surprised, perhaps—but he struck her as strangely unshocked. "What have you done with the vehicle?"

"Gone. That is, taken care of. It's at the bottom of the Pacific," Ms. Woeburne answered. Logistics always help a mind like hers. She crossed and uncrossed both legs in the uncomfortable client's chair. "I disposed of the plates. Separately. My rental account was a fake; we should have no concern."

"Good. Fine. Joelle will buy you a new one tomorrow. Something with racing stripes." The Prince's coolness splintered for a half-second giggle he couldn't hold down. It was still a nightmare, an absurdist's thing. Woeburne would've blushed had she the blood flow for it. Her wrists were a lost cause.

Partially to save-face and partially because the startling way he'd approached her made S.W. blank it, she added on: "Oh, and—sorry; I should have said this immediately—the lead was legitimate. I retrieved the intelligence. Late, but at least the Anarchs were delayed. I suppose they would've implicated us whether I got the package or not, so I... I did. I'm sorry. About the mess."

She reached into her jacket and pulled a rumpled manila envelope from behind the lapel. He leant over the enamel to accept it. And, without even popping a clasp, the entire bundle disappeared into his cabinets. No peeks, no double-checks, no covetous reading. It had been her peace offering, her cheap twine lifeline. He tossed it over the discarded hankie. A small key locked everything shut.

She did not angrily shout _"You told me there'd be no resistance"_ ; she did not accuse him of endangerment, withheld details, or poor information. She might have. Maybe a tucked-and-filed part of Ms. Woeburne had been tempted to, but larger, smarter parts knew there was no point. You might understand why full disclosure is not ideal in the postmortem game of musical chairs, a precarious dance that ends less like schoolyard eeny-meenies and more like Russian roulette. You understand, walking into this world, that very little ever happens as it seems. If you cannot roll with the punches, you deteriorate, and—eventually—blow away.

"Now." An _ahem_ sobered them up."Do bear in mind that I can only offer you protection if I know there is a need. Were you identified? We may need to take some legal precautions, as you'd imagine, from the ensuing brouhaha. Brujah-hah," Sebastian snorted, realizing what he'd just said. Ms. Woeburne meted out a pathetic smile. The clocks on the wall might go Dalí and drip off at any minute. She had never seen the portentous Mr. LaCroix lose it quite like this.

Prince LA was as apologetic as possible for tittering like a French schoolgirl. "Forgive me; I _am_ sorry. But." He captured a fountain pen meant to scratch out checks and requisitions. It tapped metronome between two fingers. Dark ink spat on clean parchment. "I do need your assessment."

"I imagine they would've had to, Mr. LaCroix. Otherwise, I have no idea what motivated an attack on me; I hadn't even made the pick-up. I hadn't got a boot on the ground. There wouldn't have been a leak?" The suggestion came with the foretaste of burgundy lipstick; it pursed her mouth into a fine line. "I hope—What I thought—I mean to say," she blurted, "I regret it. I regret anything disruptive. I know our foothold is rickety. But I didn't see a choice, so I did what I thought was best. I did what I thought I could."

"On the contrary. If you had killed a Baron on nothing more than circumstantial evidence, I'd be annoyed with you. You represent me, even when you do not. Mercenary behavior cannot be tolerated. Not from you, and not here." The arch of Sebastian's brow testified to that. It relaxed quickly, though; the entertainment of misfortune settled him back into something more temperate. "I see the thinking behind what you did. It was faulty thinking, I think you understand. But—while it may not have been on my agenda—I can hardly blame you for having survival instincts. Thankfully, no grave harm done, though I fully expect to be getting a call from those brutes some time before the night is through. Perfect. No, I am not being facetious; I bet the megalomaniacs in Hollywood are fuming splendidly. And that suits me. Not always. But it does tonight."

"Mr. LaCroix," S.W. bit out, gripped at that moment—there was something startling about the phrase "mercenary"—by an unfamiliar, knottier worry. She was staring vacantly to the black windows outside. "Should I be preparing for this? If there's likely to be counterattack, I'd want to expect them beforehand. Incidentally: my apartment isn't a fortress, and I—" She what? It hung.

The silence that followed was demeaning. It cauterized whatever else Ms. Woeburne might've said.

"You'll find that I am an excellent judge of character, Ms. Woeburne. Character and intent. It's why I've managed to subsist in Los Angeles with so little support from the higher echelons. Unlike many of our peers, I am able to clearly distinguish my friends from my enemies, and choose how to mobilize each. So," LaCroix told her, folding his hands and propping their elbows upon the table. There was something conspiratorial about it. She mimicked the posture, tilting forward, lacing her digits over the farthest edge. She hated to see his and think of them where they had been minutes ago, compressing the softest points of her face. "You can trust me when I say that the Anarchs would earn nothing by killing you now, and until they are in a position to profit, they won't. They put on shows, not tactical strikes, and they will do neither if it might make murder suspects of them. View this through a litigator's eye. They can be sure I know what happened. Ergo, they can also be sure that, if you were to turn up dead at this moment, every Camarilla finger in the county area would point their way. They don't want that. They cannot have that, because they know—if they are prudent—that I will advantage the first chance I get to rally a Blood Hunt. It is only good politics."

"Blood Hunt. And if they had— If I hadn't." She didn't finish the thought. Her belly hurt again. Her palm heels pressed hard into the marbled desktop.

"Let's not dwell on that," he persuaded, a parental look, a tut of his tongue. Ms. Woeburne swallowed again, but there was nothing to pull down. The Foreman's gums felt arid, like old seaside dirt. "You're in good health, and I'm not fond of what-if games. But yes, a killed Aedile—particularly one responsible for authoring an ongoing casefile—is what you might call a dinner bell. Perhaps there was a time not so long ago when eliminating an unknown—forgive me for saying so, Ms. Woeburne—an unknown entity of mine might've been appealing, presuming they weren't caught with bloody fingers. But the fact you've since done something to rile them, and done so in a public sphere, throws the ball out into our court. Anarchists subsist by breaking our laws and none of them are above homicide, but only when there are other suspects—suspects viable enough to impede us in punishing them. Do you understand? Hard as it may be to believe from where you're standing, you are probably safer now than you were before."

"I can appreciate that, Mr. LaCroix, but—"

"Assassinations are not their competency. Isaac wouldn't finance it. And Rodriguez sits too high on his laurels. Again, no offense meant."

"None taken. But then I don't understand what they would have been aiming at in—"

The Prince reached across his desk to lightly pat her knuckles. It was a terse, affectionate gesture, more camaraderie than patronage. Ms. Woeburne looked at the anemic stack of fingers and saw hers like a careless mouse with a broken spine. She felt offended. It is best not to ever let yourself feel that way. "Rest the issue, Ms. Woeburne. I tell you this only for now. And I tell you because I am confident we're near the end of it."

She forced a wan, grimacing smile that tasted like mothballs. "With every due respect, sir, I think Mr. de Luca might disagree."

LaCroix frowned. "Mr. de Luca was a tragic case of a vine growing faster than its pot," the Prince insisted, manners darkening, making smart-Alec Childer remember their place. "And I would like it if we did not speak so lightly of my dead officers. But you could consider your late comrade as a sort of proof. Victor was a commendable soldier. Highly dedicated. But he was not clever, I'm afraid. That's why I needed you, who are not only dedicated, but more than clever. Mr. de Luca came into my employ via trial-by-fire, and I was thankful to have him. But keep in mind that I chose you for this work. You were selected because I was certain you could address a set of concerns all politicians in my position have."

She wished something could make her wrists stop this thing they always did. The spastic energy of her limbs was an embarrassing thing to be noticed.

"Let me be direct." Mr. LaCroix's neutrality was thin with obvious condescension, and sharpened by the unpleasantness that usually took him whenever he had to explain something, making his words ungraceful and his irritated face seem younger than it was. "If you are going to assist me in this field, as seems increasingly likely, I think you should better understand the threat we face, and the parameters within which we are forced to combat it. There are two major concerns I have in America. I brought you here to help me deal with one of them. On one hand is Chinatown, as you already know. The Kuei-jin are remote and slow; little can be done about them now; we are working on a long-term solution to that misfortune. The Free-State, however: these are the wrenches in my day-to-day machines. I don't consider Anarchists a permanent threat here, but they have militarized, and they are becoming too inconvenient to tolerate. Cathayans require diplomacy sport; Anarchs are mostly a tit-for-tat intelligence game. It is a police problem. Do you understand me? We cannot outright eliminate them, but we can and will keep dissidents in-check. None of us ought to consider rabble-rousing as an inevitable part of our lives."

"You don't need to convince me," swore the Foreman who, hours ago, toed a little too uncomfortably near the end—the end of her life, specifically. You could still smell the metallic sear upon her somber clothes if you leaned in too close. Her scalp was dark and sleek where the tendrils curled beneath both ears. "I am familiar with insurgent protocol. But I would like to know how I'm expected to help."

The Ventrue do like their books—warbooks, that is. They like tested strategies that make disaster look manageable, formulaic, like text.

"Let me put it this way: In order to make our push as seamless as possible, I could use someone trustworthy behind the scenes. Trustworthiness is not exactly a common commodity in this court. Any court, in fact. You know that as well as anyone." He gave her forearm another attention-getting little tap. "And you can help me as you always have: by doing what I ask, and doing it well. In turn, I ask that you trust I am managing you well."

"Of course I do. Of course I will," she assured, one of many repetitions, something that happens when a bureaucrat feels herself begin to sweat. Teacher-pleasing was Ms. Woeburne's default. You could see he did not like the way her cropped hair bounced with each apprenticelike nod. "I'm not—doubting your methods, or waffling, or—? This is just my attempt to sound things out. You know LA is an adjustment for me. It's only that I'm more accustomed to dealing with snooping Harpies than—than counterterrorism."

"Yes, I know. I hadn't intended to put you on a bomb squad, obviously. But my plans, as I've noted, have had to shift," he added—a verbal, joyless shrug. "It's a mess. The whole thing is regrettable. Most Anarchs are like so many lemmings; the older ones always prey off their young. But no matter how badly you may feel for them, you don't let wild dogs run about uncaged, or they will overtake your neighborhood in only a little time. I need limitations. I need good officers to keep them on their toes while I build some fences, circumstances being what they are."

Ms. Woeburne looked back to her hands sitting still on the desk where they'd been placed. They looked lonely, confused. The fingers over-extended when she stretched them, like they wanted to catch something—like they lacked a small treasure, a communion wafer, a key, a piece of something. It made the quaking worse, the arteries more vulnerable. Her twitching fingertips were connected to her heart by long, clear cords that would look, under harsh light, deep blue.

"I would probably say I put them on their toes," she joked, a brittle smile. One sadly broken stiletto was tapping a frantic samba on the floor. "Do you know—if that's the goal, think I've already taken care of it. I made great time. Brassy of me, too, nearly getting killed."

It was an insolent jest to make, but the sticks of her esteem had gone tall with flattery. Yet the Foreman felt she could've promised close to anything if it would emancipate her from this office. He said nothing about the obvious shaking. She wasn't sure if this was a mercy or if the pretense of calmness made everything worse.

Mr. LaCroix was not smiling. He looked at her hands. Woeburne could not have hauled them away if she tried. "You know that I am fond of you, Ms. Woeburne. We all are. It would be unfortunate were something untoward to befall you because you did not listen to what I am saying."

It sounds mad, but sometimes it does. She could feel, yes—feel, like a nail, or a quill—the oppression of an eye circle the bone of her wrist.

Mr. LaCroix seemed thoughtful, yet there was something hollow about this interest that invalidated it, made it less like concern and more like the sort of consideration you give a showroom appliance—a blender, or a toaster, or a new set of stainless steel knives. She thought unseriously about extracting herself and telling him to stop studying her. The wrists outright rattled now. Surely he realized she wasn't reneging; that holding her up to the lamp and squinting like this wasn't necessary. Surely he knew her better than that. You have only just met Ms. Woeburne, but surely you realize, too.

"I am always," she swore, a castle of a corpse now, the shaking skeleton that held up her skin. "Always careful."

"I know you are. This is why you must offer the Baronies what we'll call our 'sincere apologies,' and you must do it with an expression authenticity—as much as you can muster. Explain that you overreacted. You received bad intelligence. Say whatever you feel is most convincing given your alibis, but keep this in mind. The only way they stand to benefit from tonight is if we do not react with the civility expected of us. You must keep dialogue open. You understand what I'm saying to you, yes?"

Ms. Woeburne lifted one hand.

She adjusted her frames, a touch to the face disguised as grooming, as tiny vanity. It was a defensive maneuver. The Prince's scrutiny was unnecessarily difficult, and S.W. just did not want to meet it any more. She felt victimish. It made her feel like a rabbit running under wing shadows.

"I brought a truck onto a Baron," Ms. Woeburne murmured thinly. "Somehow I don't think the State will be rushing to reconcile."

But she saw the downwards turn of Sebastian's mouth, and instantly regretted it. Would a clever corporal have not just echoed "yes?"

Ms. Woeburne stiffened suddenly in the wooden chair. He had flattened her hand so hard, arresting it, that the shaking stopped. She stared brain-dead at the wreckage. And right now, she did not give a damn about clichés; they were like ice.

"I hope you're not implying I'm throwing my personnel to the wolves. When I said the Party would hang itself by killing a figure in your position, in no way did I claim they weren't a danger to you," he warned, an ominous thing to say. His palm pushed her knuckles into the blacker plane of wood. "Bad judgment is more insidious than a bomb. Abrams is a puffed-up grouse; he won't let this go, not until we pay him whatever pitiable assurances he thinks he is due, but he is afraid of us. Abrams wants to know that we will let him live. Hollywood is showmanship. Rodriguez is a wolf. He is small without the others, but he will think nothing of sending a pack into the lion den's to stave off his end another night. So you must be a ready lion. Is this clear?"

"Yes," she supposed. She had nothing else to give.

The Prince released her hand. Ms. Woeburne tugged it back as though she'd been scalded.

The intercom is an awful buzz.

"Yes, Joelle? What is it?" Sebastian sounded tired. In another situation, his Childe would've jabbed a punch at Mlle. Lefevre, a bark for a cookie. She did not. She was too glad, hands in her lap, to be finished with.

"I have Baron Abrams on the line, monsieur. He says it is urgent."

"Look there. Didn't I tell you?" The Prince took up the phone with an irritated swoop of his arm. A hand heel covered the receiver. He hunkered forward, palm-to-forehead, and prepared to deal with it.

"I will have to take this call, of course," Mr. LaCroix added when she did not immediately rise. "I trust you can show yourself out. Do be more careful in the future. And."

"Sir…?" –the escape that came naturally. There was the salute. Here was the corporal, snapping to attention, a musketeer's stand, all of her lines feeling square.

"It really is very funny. When you think about it," was all he had to say.

Ms. Woeburne, leaving, thought she might be better off being a little less trustworthy, after all.


	13. For Consideration

**TO: SEBASTIAN LACROIX**  
**FROM: MARIBETH GUTIERREZ**  
**DATE: FEBRUARY 15 2010 12:36 AM**  
**SUBJECT: INTELLIGENCE RETURN 13/2**

 

Mr. LaCroix.

 

It is my misfortune to report—as I previously advised—that the intelligence recovered from Interest Point 26 (property “Sunnyside Condos”) is of little to no practical use to my department.

Encoded messages contained an accounting of what appears to be party dues or possible sales and an accompanying personnel sheet.  All names listed are obvious pseudonyms. (See: Bones. Bigshot. Peepers.)

Even if my hypothesis re: party dues is incorrect, usefully identifying these insurgents would require a heroic, long-term effort, and a considerable commitment of agency resources. They are likely low-level operatives of little interest to Camarilla enforcers. As you can no doubt see for yourself, the payout was not commensurate with the extreme personal risk.

I strongly advise against continuing the investigation. Our agents are better deployed elsewhere.

I regret that Ms. Woeburne pursued this extraction contrary to my warnings, and am left to assume she either did not receive or did not read the missive I sent you.

 

For your consideration, an excerpt of the material follows:

CHARISMA VII  
BONES II  
MEEMO X  
QUEENIE X  
VULTURE IV  
PEEPERS XX  
BIGSHOT 000

_[Document proceeds in this fashion for several dozen lines.]_

 

IN SUMMATION: Intelligence is of remarkably low priority.

 

Maribeth Gutierrez  
THEORY & TACTICS


	14. Opening Dialogue

Nines Rodriguez hit Ms. Woeburne so hard to the mouth, she spat blood.

"Pick her up," the Baron said.

The fingers that followed had no names or faces attached; they belonged, and this is all Ms. Woeburne knew, to a couple of Statesmen, and they hoisted the Ventrue to her feet. There was no shape in this whirlpool of artificial lamplight, either, so S.W. did not try to make it work. She'd stopped spitting, or bargaining, or shouting sloppily for help. It wasn't coming. She let herself be picked up.

Her eyes had swollen up. Her smashed glasses lay in a heap at the floor. Her ankles did not function. Which meant those Statesmen had to hold the Foreman aloft by each elbow, because right now, there was nothing else to do. She was hurt to some unknown degree. She was only dimly aware of being in a basement somewhere.

And she was aware of the Brujah—who were looming all about the Ventrue—who could only see one of them, standing opposite her sad little spot, cool and unsympathetic and full of Brujah hate. His arms were folded, expression granite. This kind of old feud doesn't yell and doesn't budge.

"Head up, Camarilla," the Brujah said. And then he said so to her: "Look me in the eye—and if you can't, you can follow the sound of my voice. Because I want to make sure we all appreciate the situation here."

She couldn't see much of anything at the moment; the last ringer was too fresh. Ms. Woeburne made a vague effort to lift her heavy neck. The man and the room were a blur of cold colors; the words were jumbled by a blunt weapon ringing in the hammer of her ear. She could only tell that he would've still been much too close if the Baron was another five feet away.

"You're out of your depth; I understand. I really do. So I'm going to give you a hint. I'm going to give you some pro-bono advice. I strongly recommend that you do not—do not—fuck me around here," Rodriguez spat. She tried to chuff, but it just went down like a gulp instead.

Someone's hand tapped beneath her jaw, bumped it upright, knocked the teeth inside together. The Ventrue reacted. She hadn't noticed her head beginning to slump.

"I said look at me, snake. You take a real good look before you lie to me again. Tell me how much patience you think I got left for you." It was the last thing Ms. Woeburne wanted to do, and she was sure another blow was coming soon as her eye connected, but the Foreman couldn't see much through this wooliness, anyway. She took a real good look. Closer, where there was still a little light, sat a long, pink gash down his left forearm—roundabout where it had broken through windshield glass. She focused on that. "This is the last time I ask you nicely. Whose order?"

Things had been going so well, though.

S.W. had buzzed along, checking off menial tasks and filling out wiretap warrants, relatively unapproached. No one called her. No one introduced her. No one left dire messages or subpoenas blinking on the answerphone. There were no more sketchy briefings, alleyway assignments, or spotlights shone her way. A regular schedule of professional blood dolls were sent to the officer's doorstep. A tidy regiment of ghouls had been made available for her commonplace errands. Some more ambitious clerk might've been annoyed at being so summarily sidelined, but Ms. Woeburne preferred a little yellow tape. She was just beginning to feel secure again, fitting into the niche of LaCroix's Los Angeles Plan that had been pre-cut for her. She was good at fitting anywhere.

The Foreman's apartment was a suite on floor four of Empire Arms. It, too, came pre-cut—pre-packaged, pre-decorated, pre-paid. By Joelle, specifically, though Ms. Woeburne chose not to remember that. The place was blustery and made of dark, Edwardian wood stain, colors like bleak parapets and chimneys. A lava-wet Cézanne hung over the den fireplace, one fleck of fire over pale gray carpets, steam-vacuumed and spotless. A white dining hall centered around one menacing red table more at home in law schools than under silverware. The kitchen was sorrowful Irish abbey stone, the tiled black bathroom intimidated with glass, and she even had a charity-case Caitiff doing her housework. Sweet girl – pretty, unpretentious, freckled girl – who wore no makeup and called herself Lily. Do you know, and this is just a coincidence, but lilies are Ms. Woeburne's favorite flower. A plump blue vase of them had been sitting on the island when the Foreman came home; maybe they were still there. She hoped so. She hoped none of those lilies had been collateral damage tonight.

" _But I couldn't; but I didn't; but I wasn't_ "—S.W. tried all of those, but if "but" is all you can say, you're not going to outlive anybody.

The taste of her own blood pulled a grimace across Ms. Woeburne's mouth. That last strike had clapped a canine into her tongue, slicing it cleanly down one side. Pennydust flavor overtook everything. Her teeth felt unsure of how they should sit in a mouth flooding faster than she could swallow. Talking stung like a bitch, and S.W. searched blearily for words, not sure it would do her any good.

"For the last time. The last—last—time. I'm not lying. Not about this. About anything. Everything I told you—everything is true." But her credibility somewhat damaged by the cracked face and the gluey eye. Big syllables seemed to stretch out of proportion, twisting like taffy. That snare drum rattle inside Ms. Woeburne's head didn't get any better. "There was no order. It was a mistake. A _mistake_. I had... bad intelligence" was the phrase that stuck.

Two blockish brown palms hefted under the Ventrue's armpits from behind, as though to throw her across the room—and it wouldn't have been the first time—but Rodriguez held up a hand. The ghost of Woeburne's heart rose and sank within the clutch of her gullet. There was no chance to really feel relieved; Baron LA's lieutenant dropped S.W.'s heels back to the tile, a thump that somehow hurt in her hips as dull stress ricocheted up from the soles of both feet, then dispersed.

She stumbled backwards like a sloppy rag-doll when those fists released. And then she stumbled again when they pushed the planes of her back, correcting force, allowing the officer to stand upright. Self-preservation found some balance. You can't rely on your vision when your head's been socked, but plain old common sense still knew that _toward_ Nines Rodriguez was not the direction it wanted to go. She staggered, caught in the interim between two Anarchs. It felt as though someone had switched her insides for water. Ms. Woeburne's knees were freezing in the stark space of that basement.

"Let her talk," was all he said. She didn't think she could see.

"Listen. If you'll just listen. Check my story; it shouldn't be difficult. This—this all is needless. It's pointless. Go through my call history. Contact Venture. That should prove what happened. You could've already done it; you don't need to hold me; there's just no reason. There's no way." Adrenaline mingled with pain and the mix was making her punchy. She tottered there woozily for a moment, unsupported. It felt like something was grinding just beneath the place where spine met skull. "I don't think you know what you're—"

Rodriguez's palm connected with her jawbone before the sentence closed. A large, embarrassing splatter of blood exploded from S.W.'s nose and saturated the cream-colored fabric of her shirt. Unfriendly fingers somewhere back-behind caught her again before the floor did. She saw stars.

"Try harder, Camarilla," the Baron said.

Ms. Woeburne closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself in a spotless maplewood parlor five thousand miles away.

You've figured out by now what they wanted from her, haven't you? It's not hard to imagine how one might benefit from a signed statement incriminating Prince LA for an unlicensed hit order. This certainly _seemed_ like it should qualify as crooked politics, but—behold!—they were happy to pitch democracy out a window for potential territorial gain. They were quick to drop the anti-establishmentarianism and point fingers if you'd only plop them in a witness box and say _go_. She might have managed a sore, spiteful laugh had the Brujah not just split a fat fissure right down the left side of Ms. Woeburne's bottom lip.

"Let me ask _you_ a question. Can I ask you a question? What—" She turned her head to spit a pitiful mouthful of blood onto the floor. It rolled down white linoleum and towards the single drain. "What would you like to hear, then? All things being equal. I'm just fumbling. Fumbling along. I mean, you clearly have something in mind," the Foreman suggested. Skelter's fists sank deeper into her collar. The third Anarch, a scraggled and malicious senior guard in scuffed leather, was watching their hideous scene nonchalantly from the far (only) door. He was much older than the other two. Spiderwebs clustered above him, spindly shadows on musty aluminum paint; there were no other signs of life in the tight, dim, echoing room. Ms. Woeburne could not worry about him. She wiped her mouth into her bicep. It was ticking _drip-drip-drip_. "So let's have it. He can nod my head _yes, sir._ And we can end this joke, so _you_ could tell _us_ what business you had seizing a Board member. That stands to solve both our questions. Unless that's the problem. Unless you're where the intelligence went bad, because you were hoping to shoot me in the back of the—"

Ms. Woeburne was a little exasperated with herself. Breakneck accusations are not generally wise interrogation survival tactics, but it's not like being wise protected her from Nines Rodriguez or the rings on his fists. The Baron had sent some capped goons to drag S.W. here, dumped her on the floor, kicked her, de-hooded her just to shine a flashlight in her dilated eyes, and began a brutal cross-examination. At first she'd been polite: downcast, excessively businesslike, obsequious and willing to cooperate. Now, having been better acquainted with what sort of metal goes into an Anarch's boot, the trampled Foreman figured lobbing flack wasn't hurting her chances.

Do you know, she considered pleading for mercy, too—crying for her Sire, making a big watery fuss, defaulting on claim of ignorance. But she found her chances unsatisfying, and apologism unforgivable. If S.W. was really going to die here, and like this, at the very least she should try to zing her last words.

The blow was all knuckle this time; cruel indentations from his rings whipped into her face. They seared a warmth across Ms. Woeburne's cheeks like firelight, and the nonspecific pain turned Mr. LaCroix's earlier promise of "you will be fine" into salt. _'On second thought, make that bullshit.'_

Ms. Woeburne was a little lukewarm about Mr. LaCroix's leadership skills at present.

The Prince's gave her something rare: advice. Except the advice he gave only applied to a scenario in which his representative ended up in a tête-à-tête with Isaac Abrams (unlikely) or Mr. Rodriguez (evidently a lot more likely). He had perhaps not anticipated the latter's cronies would burst into Woeburne's bathroom early one morning, throw a sack over her head, huck the flailing vampire into a jalopy and drive off. She'd tried to escape. She'd flailed for a viable weapon and twisted her neck away from some strange, suffocating hand. She'd peeled off the shower curtain and put her foot into the mirror. None of the glass found its way into her fingers. So they'd taken the Foreman, with all her sloppy kicks and mean fingernails, somewhere else. S.W. did not know where. Who knew if they were still in California, at all?

There is nothing worse to a Ventrue than not knowing where she is. Somehow—somewhere in that bumpy intermission she'd spent tied up and blindfolded in a lightless Anarch trunk—the unthinkable had started feeling like the inevitable.

And here she was now: choking, belly-down, grimacing at her reflection in the steel toe of Nines Rodriguez's boots.

"Pick her up," he said again. Skelter went to do it. Ms. Woeburne, vertigo whirling mightily after that last punch, failed to realize she'd connected with the floor.

"Get your hands off me," the Foreman slurred, but it came out like incoherency. Ms. Woeburne, censorship chief, had lost her words, and was getting genuinely dismal now.

Miraculously, though, he did. She was up to her elbows-and-knees. But without the fists in her shirt, elbows and knees slipped out from under her, leaving S.W.'s queasy gut/aching ribs number to smack the badly-laid tile.

Was that a dollop of spit that landed on her blouse? Her own spit? This was just insulting.

From the back of that horrible car, S.W. had assumed—kidnappers being Anarchs—they would simply kill her. She regretted this turn of events, sure. It was a waste of a death. Every Camarilla agent acknowledges the possibility of climbing into the Cadillac one night and being blown to carnage and viscera, courtesy of rebel love… but you hope for something flashier than a tacky cellar, blunt trauma, and a tarnished sewer grate. This whole place smacked distastefully of Bolshevik. It smelled like rust, steam scum and mildewed pipes. If they were going to chop off her head, Ms. Woeburne remembered thinking—a heartbeat of madness dressed up like sanity—they may as well hurry up and do it.

This irreverent train of thought was interrupted by Skelter's thoughtful kick of encouragement just beneath S.W.'s liver, however, and then she was looking at the ceiling. And since she was looking at the ceiling, retaliation arrived via a mouthful of pink saliva the Foreman hawked where she imagined his face might be. Unclear if the missile made contact, but there was a curse, and then a loud fire of laughter from that door-lurker—who might've been Smiling Jack; the Anarch dossiers were a nebulous blur. Someone grabbed Ms. Woeburne by the scruff of her high-necked top and deposited the Ventrue into a folding chair. They were neither gentle nor kind. Her legs bent like snapped cigarettes. Her feet were sockless; she'd kicked off her shoes just moments before a pounce; he'd been hidden, perhaps, inside the dining room coat closet. She struggled to focus on all ten toenails. They were painted. Periwinkle. That sugar-sweet color filled her with sudden, ridiculous, suffocating regret. Who dies with purple toenails?

"It doesn't matter. This doesn't matter," she told them, but you could hear the dark crush of her fear like the ticking of a wet watch. "A broken rib. A broken nose. What do you think you're doing? It doesn't matter at all; it's nothing. You are going to pay all of this back and more. Give the Prince a reason to cut off your head; go on. You people do not matter. You do not last."

Do you know the story of the Molly Maguires? Does anyone remember, in the history of this bull-market place, the coffins and the dynamite of a century before—how the people, when starving, ate up themselves? The Mollies would cut off their hands before a foreman could have them (if they couldn't reach yours); they wrote letters in mule's blood; they poured kerosene on their work to hurt a man who might profit from what he hadn't done. What do you do when you won't do anymore? Do you sharpen your fork and stick some spite into your knee so as not to be used on a company line? Do you stuff your saddlebags with TNT and blow the house down? These are the questions of untouchables who, every once in a decade or two, will throw off their blinders to see they are sinking.

Nines Rodriguez looked like someone designed to sink. Not Gorbachev, not Mussolini; Wałęsa and X. America had already burned all its company stores, but it's still the Maguire blacklung pride that made everybody want to be a Johnny Mitchell Man. Look to old photographs to find this kind of a face. In images where children suffer—kids of dark cheeks and sad amputations and cave-ins, their gazes distracted and hobnail rough—there will be at least one dirty face looking back at you through the distance of years. It's a mostly unremarkable face. But the eyes in the face stop you. There is a cleanness to them, a clear-headedness colorlessness. Those are eyes that hate you and want you to know. Those eyes have watched you, have cracked your best code, figured you out. He's seen what you did. When the other children are stuck in one time and one place, that child turns the ghost white of his stare to that camera lens and he looks because there is a _you_ in there. He knows this was never about justice; this is about what you can take, and what you can take away. And he wants you to know, too – that your secret is out, that someone is coming for you, that there are dirty children who will grow up to play this taking game better, bloodier, than you can. You are not forever. You are not singular. That face is timeless in that it appears in every decade everywhere over the world.

Of course, you should remember that this scathing critique of radicalism and mill children began with a roundhouse punch to the side of her skull. Maybe head trauma had something to do with being so bitterly underwhelmed.

"This does not matter. This will not stand. If you people want to live, you will stop asking me questions. Live or die. Let me go," Ms. Woeburne said. It was the bravest bargain she had.

_Let her talk._

_"Let them have Hollywood,"_ Mr. LaCroix had snorted during a telephone conversation last year. _"If the libertines and the rabble box themselves up, so much the better for me. I will take a quarantine. I won't take a number."_

This month's number was four. Four operatives—Victor de Luca, two Gangrel scouts, and one Chantry Apprentice—had dropped off their radar. Ms. Woeburne makes five. Was five the winning number? Only the first soldier in this count actually turned up dead; someone had reported the others missing. Someone else had supposedly seen the Tremere alive; she was carrying firearms; she was not answering to her birthname, and had purportedly moved into an apartment downtown, a corner address on an Anarch safe street.

This made Sebastian nervous.

Ask a Cappadocian what happens when your existence makes your betters nervous. You will see the problem. You will understand, then, what she means.

No one had stopped her. Ms. Woeburne was still taking. "Give them a chance. Give them the shot. They will not pass on this. Prince LaCroix—"

She could not finish. Someone grabbed her by the hair and yanked back until her spine was straight against the chair.

"You need to start thinking," the Ventrue was told, "about your immediate surroundings. You need to recognize where you are. More, you need to realize that he, and they, ain't here. And I am." Rodriguez had a switchblade from a coat pocket in his hand. "And you are."

Cobwebs, clamor, blood in hail on the floor. Just about everything burned.

"So I wish you'd come around," the Baron went on. That old photograph face was wearing an expression of mild apology, of having life outside this graveyard room, of being somebody's beloved. There was a dull bell gong in the recesses of her skull. There were another man's heavy hands oppressive on either side of her head. Skelter had let go of her hair. "Really I do. But if you're not going to talk to us, I got so many options, and that's where this is going."

S.W. scowled. You need two for a game of Good Cop/Bad Cop. "If you're going to make threats," she snapped; each pause was a wet, vermillion wheeze. "Then make them. Don't waste time looking out for me. Do what you will with your time; but do not waste mine."

"I'm not threatening. I'm telling," Nines said, casual as a thug with a knife in his hand can be. He held out the weapon in the crease of one palm. "Think about it."

She should not have said the name LaCroix here. There was an ember of old tyranny in S. Woeburne: indignation, rulebooks. An autocrat; a silhouette in a stoplight camera snapshot sitting on Baron LA's kitchen table. It's a look men like Rodriguez know—a little put off, a little smug, a little disconnected. It was a look that looked through you. It didn't see any one thing; it saw everything in pieces, a vicious math. To people like this, you are a hundred working hinges, cogs to grease and axles to break. It's a mind that can't be bothered with melding all the elements together. They prefer to deconstruct and diagram where to best take you apart.

Her back was unflinching. Her arm muscles flexed against cheap furniture. She pursed the hard, thin ledge of her lips. That stainless steel blade soaked lamplight and looked vaguely like something that might be The End.

Ms. Woeburne cleared the phlegm from her throat. She thought about it.

"Fuck you," she said, precisely, as the blood ran through spaces between her teeth.

Anarchs suffer like faces in a grayscale frame. Their eyes were everywhere else. Rodriguez stood quietly and looked at her.

"Bad choice, blueblood," he observed.

And then there was a terse closed blow to S.W.'s solar plexus. She doubled like a folding easel.

The sun-star of pain distorted whatever else the Baron said, and she tried valiantly to batten-down last night's dinner. The Ventrue's nostrils streamed onto her skirt and marred drab, official beige. She didn't have enough left in her to vomit, so Woeburne spat instead, knowing her throat was foaming. The growl that followed it was more of a dejected mewl. Rodriguez stepped back; Skelter pulled her upright again, his hands hard but particular, like a high quality wood. She swallowed and swallowed and waited for that blow to dissipate.

The dig of the Brujah's fist into her abdomen left an echo of itself behind. Had that knife been speared between his fingers? She could still feel an imprint of knuckles but wasn't sure if she'd been stabbed. Ms. Woeburne checked; the blade was clean.

"You don't know me. You don't know about me. So let me make something clear to you, bitch." The Anarch touched a knee to the floor and snapped open the spring blade six inches from Ms. Woeburne's nose. Muted light pirouetted, scattered the floor, leapt to her collarbone. She twisted away so it wouldn't go into her eye. Was the jugular any better? There's no actual answer to that sort of debate. Skelter had a fistful of her dark pelt and forced the attached head to pay attention. The blade gave a dour, murderous ' _snick_.' "I don't make threats. I am educating you. Lesson One, Cam: Talking is all you have. You don't talk, you lose all importance, and then you are nothing to LA. Then you ain't some-body no more. And you are just a-body to me."

"You," she said, and swallowed—knowing it was obvious with the fist in her hair, with her head pulled back—unable not to—feeling it stiffen her neck all the way down. "Don't know what you're talking about."

There was a crinkling in someone's back pocket.

And here is the gotcha.

He held it too close to her face. She didn't know what she was looking at. For a while, she couldn't see.

Then the black lines on the white paper went crisp.

 

* * *

_It is my expert opinion that the fatal action taken against the deceased be ruled a homicide, and all organizational actors be prosecuted to the full extent of Camarilla law._

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
HENDON ESTATES

* * *

 

A finger tap-tapped over her name. Then it—and the paper—were gone into the crunch of Nines Rodriguez's fist.

"That you?" the Baron asked—and he was much too quiet to want an answer—and Ms. Woeburne couldn't believe her eyes enough to say.

No, she said.

Yes, she said.

She said I never. I never wrote that.

Nines said: Oh, please.

"Listen," she told him, going all to bubbles now. There was a feeling inside her lung like white sand. Like the hourglass had been turned over, flipped ahead of its time. She couldn't quiet her limbs all of a sudden. There was a quaking. Skelter let her hair go. "That was never intended for—that was a private report. An analysis. Internal analysis only—it wasn't for— " Sand on the floor. A hole in the glass. "And I didn't write it. I mean—yes, I did write it, but not that. That's a forgery. It's a—it's a what. It's a—"

" _Set-up_?" The Baron was worse and worse the quieter he got.

And so S WOEBURNE was, too. She couldn't catch her breath, somehow. The corporal went to pieces and that crack in her glass spidered all the way up.

I don't know! she splintered.

I don't know—maybe—

She said why the fuck not!

And then she said nothing. There was air in her heart.

He'd proved the knife on the meaningless place between her finger and thumb. Stuck it in one blunt, decisive movement. Then came a strange reverberation, ricketing through the chair and her nerves and the stuff around them. Blood welled in the hinge. She felt it like an illness and a sear and couldn't move. Iron ore, burning like something monstrous.

The last voice she heard was Smiling Jack's. "Ah, boy. Now you went and pissed her—"

Something monstrous came up and switched Ms. Woeburne off.

The frenzied Ventrue lunged forward, world red. There was a rip and a warm tear and a stout, angry scream. A thing clattered. Teeth clacked together in the cold air inches from a Baron's throat. It had happened so quickly that, for a moment, Ms. Woeburne thought she was dead.

Then there were hands at her neck, nails beneath her chin; there was shutter of light. It felt like a bunch of worms had fallen through her ribs and landed writhing in a cradle of nerves. Brujah blood lit like a struck match in the stale air. She would be sick. She was going to throw up, expel the monster-thing that way. The Foreman was dully aware of being slammed prostrate onto a wall, tailbone shrieking as it connected with plaster. The shock crumbled her Frenzy. S.W's lids were rheumy and squeezed shut before they let her see anything. She was going to die—this was it; she was going to die—but Ms. Woeburne would not give them an eye to look into and see terror calcifying, like sediment dragging the bottom of old bottle-glass.

Jack was grinning up at her—right at her cracked eye, when it opened—suspending the Foreman with a kneecap to the abdomen and one hand around her neck.

"Ain't that pwecious?" he clucked, lips puckered. Two punishing fingers snatched a flap of round cheek and gave it a sadistic, humiliating shake. "Heh-heh-heh-heh! Lookie here, fellas! We got a live one."

She writhed and groped uselessly, put her hand blood all over his. The old Brujah's chuckles sounded like a motorbike with a bad exhaust pipe. The switchblade was throbbing in Skelter's thigh. Nines Rodriguez look ghastly—standing still by himself across the room—discovering the line of skin that had opened along the bone of his chest.

Skelter pulled out the knife and threw it aside. The lieutenant was all twitching horsepower and livid gloom. Capillaries rose upon massive forearms and his eyes, wide and furious, stood out like pearl husked right from the shell. S.W. found herself staring down the brackish 'O' of his unsheathed handgun. He would've shot her had not Jack stepped in and grabbed the berserk Ventrue before she could damage anyone else.

"I see that." The precision of Skelter's voice was at tight, alarming odds with the boiling on his face. A large splotch had soaked the jeans over his stab wound. Jack was tutting about something being downright embarrassing; the blade waited on unclean linoleum until somebody picked it up. "Maybe we should stop fucking around and take care of this right now. I am not going to risk this trust fund motherfucker pulling some Weekend Wing Chun shit on the next kid we send down here to—"

"Yeah, yeah—woof woof, asshole. Take a gander and tell me, lance corporal." Smiling Jack gave her a tiny baby bounce, one that made Ms. Woeburne choke and paw his arm like the two-beat dandling would snap her neck. "This look like a high mountains secretmaster to you?"

"She could be playing limp-wrist. I can't tell with a suit. Do _you_ know?"

"Oh-kay. I get it: all-business Black dude, blue-balls and hard-assed, forever-at-'Nam. Charlie on my Six, right? Mango-tango alpha-and-out?"

S.W., still hanging like a watersnake—still scrabbling to try and keep her vertebrae from separating—had all these words racketing back-and-forth around her. She felt her heart trying to breach the ground floor of her throat. The pistol had worked its way into a more relaxed position, but it was still in Skelter's hand, bumping against the unstabbed thigh.

"I'm gonna go out on a limb and suggest that we're not seeing the same thing, here," Jack proposed. Her eyeballs rolled as the pressure of his grip loosened and tightened in rapid, pumplike succession—which would have been cruel, if anyone had been paying attention to the trapped Foreman right now. (They weren't.) "You maybe damaged your eyesight out in the jungle, kiddo? One too many secret berry hoodoo icies down the hatch?"

"Man, fuck your racist ass-backwards bullshit. Somebody in this chummy little outfit has to think once and a while. Do what you want. I'm not going to stand around guessing with my hands in my pockets."

"Racist! Aww. I'd be cryin' if my hands weren't crammed down my pockets. Oh, wait—this one's full."

"Un-fucking-believable. Swear to God. I swear to God. Will you please, please shut up with this shit. I am trying to deal with this beyond fucked-up situation; get a rise out of somebody else. You don't know this woman from Adam, and if you want to bet _your_ ass on shitbrained stereotypes, that's fine. But I draw up the rotations around here, and I am telling you now: you are not going to wager my men's lives on a —"

"Oh, yeah!" Woeburne gargled as she slipped an inch in his paw and felt the Brujah's thumbs gouge pitilessly into the soft nodes nestled up under her jaw. Jack's teeth were wickedly long and it all looked like terror—The Enemy suspending her by her least-durable part, smiling at somebody else. "I forgot you were a down-set-super-plex-post-woke-anarcho-feminist-type brother. Boyo, I tell ya. You must have been drowning in pussy power back on the quad. White women love that shit. I bet Stacey, here, is all a-quiver. Want to peek and find out?"

"Knock it the FUCK off. Right now."

"Wow! Hey, buddy," Jack squawked, blinking innocently. " _You're_ the one talking about blowing her brains out. Were you or were you not just on team Murder This Trust Fund Motherfucker?"

"Look, you son-of-a-bitch. ALL I am saying is—"

"By the way: _bitch_ is a slur, GI Bill Boy."

"—off my back—right now— _right_ now—and listen to what I'm—"

"—ha-ha! That's no way to speak to your elders. Didn't your mama teach you to—"

"— _none_ of your business what we—"

"HEY—both of you—do me a fucking favor. Shut up." The forfeit had come from Rodriguez. She could barely glean him from the corner of an eye, if it strained left to the point of pain; there was a dark, terrible shade on his shirt that made her barren stomach retch. He covered his cut with his left hand. "Let her down."

Skelter went quiet. Jack did, too. Ms. Woeburne did her best to muffle a grim, frothy, suffering noise in the silence.

And then, no more back-and-forth and no more peripheral handguns: S.W. was an ugly heap of limbs on the floor. Jack carelessly dropped her. She launched into a coughing fit that tasted like lead and came up fuchsia—a too-sick, too-weak degradation of pink.

They all watched her coil for a minute—the shovel-flatted rattlesnake on their basement floor—three faces a lopsided tableau of furious, disturbed, and mildly amused.

"Leave her," the Baron said, and Ms. Woeburne could scarcely believe her sticking brain hadn't made that up. She lay unmoving on the sadly overlapped tile. She held in all the air that she'd gasped. "I'm not dealing with this right now. Cam is out of her goddamn mind. Lock the place down. Give her a drink. One drink. Post a guard at this door early tomorrow—and for Christ's sake, not Damsel."

That was enough. The light bulbs were unscrewed, the troops were gone, and a viscous bag of blood was flopped, fishlike, on the floor. They left in the scrape of a deadbolt and the slam of a black metal door.

Ms. Woeburne did not stir. She let it close upon her like the cover of a book.


	15. Fwd: Accidents

**TO: RAMA LINVILLE**  
**FROM: JOELLE LEFEVRE**  
**DATE:  MARCH 3 2010 12:12 AM**  
**SUBJECT: AS A FAVOR**

 

Dear Rama,

 

Let me just begin by saying that none of this is, of course, your fault. I know you are clean as a whistle! It is really not fair.

Here is a message I am sending to Isaac Abrams at 12:35. Have a look for yourself; I think you will pick up the hint. So sorry it worked out this way.

Since you have been so sweet to work with, as a favor to you, I thought—twenty minutes head start?

No hard feelings.

 

Joelle

 

* * *

 

**FWD:**

**TO: ISAAC ABRAMS**  
**FROM: THE OFFICES OF THE PRINCE**  
**DATE:  MARCH 3 2010 12:34 AM**  
**SUBJECT: REGARDING AN ACCIDENT**

Dear Mr. Abrams,

 

It is not remiss to us that you have been, unfortunately, exposed to certain documents of interest to the Los Angeles Board.

As we are sure you are aware, personnel investigations and all records pertaining to them are the confidential property of LaCroix Foundation and its associates. This exclusivity includes but is not limited to the ongoing de Luca case. We are left to assume you received the document in question due to a security leak—which we, of course, regret immensely. Please accept our apologies for the exposure.

We want to personally assure you that the responsible individual has been identified as a former employee and will be punished most harshly.

Prince LaCroix reminds you that this is an internal affair and will not be declassified until a verdict is reached. We are confident you will not encourage the further illicit spread of Foundation materials.

If you encounter any additional information regarding this or other Board interests, you are welcome—and required—to let us know.

Have a very pleasant evening.

 

Cordially, **  
**

JOELLE LEFEVRE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES


	16. Lockdown

When the Ventrue sleeps, she dreams.

It is a natural process. The human mind doubles-back on itself with nowhere to go. It folds the beta waves into strange batter, like angel cake, or the clay you'd find in a riverbed. Memories are like crop-dust. Some animals curl themselves small and rest, but your average vampire cannot separate itself from the old brain entirely; they still hear an echo of dream.

The Ventrue had been a lion up to her knees in hot sand when she awoke suddenly, unkindly, digging scratches in the linoleum and choking on her tongue.

Darkness stirred unkindly, too. The silence collapsed into her ear, down the canal, flushing the hammer. Stale air bristled everything up. Pain was the most impressive arrival, however. It arrived long before the Foreman's eyesight adjusted, bringing with it a distasteful bunch of friends: muscle ache, scabs, and a stubborn hunger. Ms. Woeburne was not used to being hungry. The bad taste of bubbles in her tummy matured into a rumble, a sound somewhere beneath the lungs. And, as of this moment, it frightened more than it hurt.

S.W. absently fumbled for the blood bag they'd left her. Its contents had gone sluggish and lukewarm, already unappetizing fare worsened by being room temperature. And worse still: her shaking hands, nails broken at the quick, wouldn't behave. After several unsuccessful tries, the Foreman stowed her pride and simply bit in with a squelch. Teeth cut artificial skin. The brief chemical flavor of hospital, and then, finally, relief—through holes, over gums, disappearing down her throat in six big gulps. The gluttony was embarrassing, even in private. But she'd no way of knowing how frequently these people were going to feed her, or if they would even do it again.

Time had gone a little funny. She'd slept for a while, probably hours. There were no clocks, just wounds: the sore thumb, the dreadfully swollen face. _'Ah, yes,'_ she thought, tonguing the insides of her cheeks, feeling how bulbous they still were. _'Black eye as my prison calendar. There's a new one. There's some ingenuity.'_

The Foreman gingerly explored her features, grimacing at the notches and crusts. Indeed, there were the outlines of Rodriguez's rings, right where he'd left them yesterday. One eye had bloated almost-shut, the lashes sticking. All her teeth seemed safely in-place, though the lips around them wore a painful split. Blood-slick hair had dried in coarse, sooty reels, until grim brunette felt more like a deep-mountain, dirty coal. A sizeable, stinging bump along the bridge of her snout suggested it had snapped. Pressing upon this hard protrusion brought sharp life to Ms. Woeburne's tear ducts, though, and so she abandoned the investigation. She breathed out slowly. She sat.

Someone—probably not Nines Rodriguez, himself—but _someone_ was going to pay through the fucking nose for this.

Ms. Woeburne clumsily unbuttoned her shirt on a careful hunt for broken ribs. There were no misalignments or, worse, hooks poking out, so she put them away, rewrapping papery dead skin. It all stung quite badly. But a yellow torso is leagues preferable to wheezing blood—or stretching over and putting a splintery bone through her side.

A sudden wild thought: there was nothing guaranteeing they hadn't put cameras in here. Ms. Woeburne cursed probably more than was called-for and jostled painfully the rest of the way back into her blouse. She supposed someone could've, you know, stripped her if they'd a mind to do that. And she had bigger problems, but neither this knowledge—nor this life—cleared every petty modesty. Undeath is hard on the female body. Not to mention the political humiliation, which wasn't worth thinking about. Topless Aedile—there's a piece of Nosferatu voyeurism to die for. It was all your up-and-coming officer needed: half-nude leap from kidnapee to a blackbook bonus payment on some sick fledgling's wall. She would not be anyone's joke.

But again, it wasn't worth thinking about, and she probably wouldn't care if she was dead.

Heaven help them once Venture figured all this out.

They'd respond. They'd have to. Ms. Woeburne entertained no delusions of Mr. LaCroix dashing to the rescue, but the language of Blood Hunts is encouraging to someone bolted behind a cellar door. Maybe he would send his panzer of a Sheriff, and maybe, if the agent was lucky, he would do so before she died.

Yet this was all assuming someone had noticed S.W. disappeared. It was quite possible she'd die here and do it long before the Camarilla mounted a recovery effort. My God—what if she was never found? What if her résumé was swept under some tattered rug in an Anarch bar? With no testimony and no corpse, Rodriguez was in a position to lie however he liked; Los Angeles could make no motion before concrete evidence came in.

Evidence: Had she written that line? Had she forgotten it? Do you forget something like that? It was hard to think just now. She'd written and unwritten so much.

They would never release her. That much was clear.

Ms. Woeburne might've made herself sick, and she almost felt herself begin to cry—which hurt, by the way—but instead: an interruption. There was one moonlit crack through the dismal door. In all this dark, it was blinding.

A Statesman's shaggy blond mug peered around the entrance, eyes flame-brown and framing an obvious question. There was a tinge of embarrassment in his laidback, cautious, insubstantial voice.

"Hello, Missus... Camarilla." A lanky hand swept through the hair to his shoulders, made it awkwardly fall. He had a battered corduroy and flat orange sneakers. He looked like the kind of person you deputize as a lark."You still kicking in there, Cam?"

His nose crinkled guiltily at the squinting Ventrue. Her pupils contracted immediately, stung by the sudden sear of light; she couldn't make out much. But Ms. Woeburne scented Toreador surely as the sterile twang of packaged blood. It slapped loudly on the ground, sloshing like a wineskin. She tore her eyes from the shut door to the peace offering as he removed a bulb from his blazer pocket. Two twists with deft fingers, and the basement was bathed in mellow, unclean white.

Ms. Woeburne flung her brow back into the crook of an arm and growled.

"Sorry about that," the Toreador murmured, semi-sincere. His footsteps moved him forward; he'd a sort of rolling, drifter's curve, kneecaps bent, somebody's favorite rookie. "Don't mind me. I'm nobody; just the middle man. Boss said to bring you breakfast. The light was my idea, though. You can thank me some other time." An unlikely snerk from one side of lopsided grin. S.W. might've slapped off that schoolboy nose. Fortunately, she was not remiss in noticing the pistol jutting from his right pant leg.

"Get out," Woeburne spat, haunches shivering. Her eyes were a hungry, cat-green color over the barrier of her forearm.

"Rude." The Anarch's tongue clucked his upper palate. He shoved both hands into the weathered corduroy and blinked at her. "How's your face, Cam?"

It was full of teeth. The Toreador, though, was all sing-song about it, making a show of his casualness. He probably been instructed to judge how fit their prisoner looked for another interrogation. She didn't want to cooperate, but focusing was becoming difficult with food so close at hand. Eyelets of B-positive strained through needle holes in the cork. Weak grade, but still edible. It smelled like door-to-door insurance salesman.

"It is what it is, I suppose." The Statesman smacked his lips, then shrugged helplessly. He had overlarge, loveable ears."Guess that concludes my business here. Boss'll probably be by in a day or two. I'd tell you things would be a lot less uncomfortable if you'd play along, but from the way I figure, it'd just be blowing my breath. Try not to starve, eh?"

"GET OUT."

He lifted both palms in retreat. He didn't hurry. "Fine—you don't have to scream. Sleep tight, Cam."

She watched the yellow mane disappear with a carefree, jackrabbit bob through the door, listened to it bolt, and made the feral self-promise to kill him first.

' _Two more days. Two more days; I'm already losing my mind.'_

She decided to close her freewheeling mind and stop thinking.

Ms. Woeburne stood up in flickering lamplight, dusting both knees. They were ugly with everything done to them. But she expected that. You have to expect ugliness, damage. You have to expect that you'll think unpleasant, treacherous things. You have to compartmentalize these things; pull them out of your terror, set them aside. You have to prioritize.

Rescue hopes were morning glories—temporary blooms. Now was time for taking care of a body, one that happened to be her own. Keep the machine oiled, keep it fueled. Some winches are broken, but others still move.

Better to sleep than to dream without purpose, presuming she could sleep anymore. The Foreman pushed all the air from her lungs and sat in a corner to shake some more. It was a dismal, dreary sound.

 _'Awful. Terrible,'_ she noted. Awful, precisely, to be so pathetic, to have feet so dirty, nails still purple as a teenager. Her toes were over a metal grate that looked like Soviet stuff, like the place where all your death mess funneled away. She was a Red Scare baby in a time before this, Ms. Woeburne. There was a smell of rainwater rising from beneath, of a dark place. She did not want to touch it or see. _'I suppose I can't get it open, anyway. Maybe if I had a bit of metal... a bit flat enough. A stick, something? At least it might be sharp._ ' Sharp enough to fight with? Sharp enough to use the circlet on her throat? A gory suicide, but with so few options, would it not be preferable to dust-by-Anarch?

 _'No. No, no. Too ignoble.'_ Ms. Woeburne rolled her one good eye at the bout of fatalism. The thing was tetanus-ridden. It would never cut deep enough or fast enough. And beyond that: what would Mr. LaCroix think of her?

Would he much care?

The prospect of your own insignificance is too horrid to be faced—not inside a prison. Surely she was more useful alive than not.

Choosing self-preservation over basement drain hara-kiri, S.W. upturned the new blood bag, drank a quarter to silence her grumbling stomach, and saved the remains. With two pints down, she felt marginally hardier. If that sore-strut Toreador could be convinced to bring a paperback and a record or two, she might be able to scrape out an existence down here. The notion creased a fresh cut down her bottom lip. Bessie Smith and Stendahl, political prison backdrop _._ Prime piece of evidence that she really needed to see about getting over herself sometime soon. Maybe genetics had affected her bean-counter sensibility more than the counter cared to admit.

Wealth is not just a nice touch, you know. (Something you would know, undoubtedly, if you were Ventrue.) Sebastian was old-fashioned only in this. The oldest fashions, the first ones. Kalahari diamonds, Mesopotamian oil, Gauteng gold. That kind of wealth rubs off. You grow dependent upon the aftertaste even if you do not care to. This is the thing on her mind in the basement of an Anarch Domain.

Ms. Woeburne cannot tell you what wealth like this means beyond the words; she has never been a high-stakes player or a person to whom money is a god. She is not herself extravagant for all of this ruby and leather. But surely there were other Childer. Other corporals over the centuries—she could not have been unique, no—but S.W. had never met any. She had no reason to assume they were or had ever been alive.

The chair she'd been stuffed into earlier would've been a welcome addition to this drab little box (or perhaps a decent weapon, once taken to bits). But, of course, they'd taken that, too. Ms. Woeburne hugged her knees to her chest in an attempt to compensate and propped her chin atop them, like a punished girl.

She hadn't been lying: it was pointless. The most pointless thing she's ever heard, dying here. It ranked right between professional sports and feature journalism.

' _Wasteful. That's really what it is.'_ And S. Woeburne despised wastefulness, couldn't abide inefficiency. Good corporals utilize every resource to completion. She was impeccably, brutally meticulous; she recycled stray papers, shredded business documents and discarded editorials; she wore her coats to tatters; she snugly capped her pens.

 _Pens._ She didn't mean to measure her life in office products, but it was sort of natural. It couldn't be helped.

Ms. Woeburne hammered her brow with a palm heel, thought about pacing, and ultimately didn't waste the effort.

Instead, she narrowed on the only source of movement, a thing that might distract her: one beetle, six legs, that's all. It was tangerine-orange, a hatchling on its way. The Foreman watched it crawl up an adjacent wall. It moved in interesting, concentrated ways. Antennae tapped out a cautious path; small shell scuttled; toes ventured forward with militant precision. It evoked a sort of pity, just a bit of disgust. Was this little grain of energy capable of comprehension? Could it ever appreciate how close it crawled to extinction through that mighty focus? Not likely, but the story of nature is usually sad.

Its color almost made her grateful. She could notice it here in the on-and-off dark.

The Ventrue's eyes followed her miniature cellmate a few more moments before, mandibles chattering, it drew too near—and, with one thumb, Ms. Woeburne smashed it.


	17. Windflower

Four days since Saturday, and Lily felt something was wrong.

She'd been scheduled to drop by Ms. Woeburne's yesterday. There was never much to be done at Ms. Woeburne's—empty the garbage bins, dust the electronics, zip-tie the cords, iron the clothing, run tired suits to the laundromat, close up, leave. Barely seemed like you'd need a housekeeper for those things, and after the pens had been capped and the printer ink refreshed and the lapels flattened out, Lily sometimes worried about keeping her job.

She wanted this job. The compensation was generous. The vampire was quiet, upright, predictable—sort of a cold fish, but not a particularly difficult lady to work for. There were no problems. _No problems._ That was never exactly true, but it was truer now, with a little solid income and the distant protection of serving somebody bigger than you.

Lily quickly trusted Ms. Woeburne. Whenever you said hello to her, the Ventrue would force a stiff smile, disrupting the darkness beneath that anxious stare, and she tipped well. She didn't give out much else—just those prickly, inorganic grins and twenty-dollar bills. They made the littler vampire feel sad, almost. Those smiles always felt a little like crinkling paper.

Rolf had been a Ventrue, too; she understood that much, if not exactly what it meant.

Lily sometimes wondered if this cool, polite professionalism could've been what her own life, given better genes, might be. She was sure her boss lived alone, and doubted it had ever been otherwise. Ms. Woeburne had bleached cabinets, tables made of redwood, a dresser full of black ties and an excellent computer—but apart from that, not much to be talked about—not much to be kept or given out. Ms. Woeburne did not stop to chat chat. Not about personal things, or what she missed about being alive, or her moments of unhappiness. She never sulked or looked defeated. Their bodies were both female. Their hair was about the same length.

It was mildly suspicious and somewhat off-putting, but Lily mostly thought it was kind of a shame.

Who even knew what it was Ms. Woeburne actually did for a living. Lily had been told only that her employer worked at Venture Tower downtown, obviously in a position that paid pretty well; she dolled hundreds out like pocket change and seemed underwhelmed by crystal or marble. She always called ahead to cancel appointments, and usually paid bit extra in advance. So Lily didn't worry about it. She left alone what Ms. Woeburne said to leave alone. She didn't try to become friends (though she would maybe have liked to). "Ms. Harris" sounded too stilted, so she asked to be called Lily. That was the warmness they shared.

Symbiosis—you know that word? It's when a small creature latches to a larger one so benefits can be exchanged. Generally, you should accept kindnesses from big sharks, but expect that kindness must be repaid somehow. Lily was a bit of a lamprey. She never forgot how easy it would be to pluck her off.

(And seriously, being a lamprey for a shark is still better than being other things to other vampires. Sure beats starving on the beach, running from the Sabbath, hiding from the scouts. And it beats crying on both knees in the bedroom carpet, begging Rolf to change her back.)

So, when Saturday came and went—and then another day, and another—Lily began to wonder if Ms. Woeburne was all right.

She hated to barge in, but here she was, anyway: scuttling awkwardly up Empire Hotel that evening; trading a nod with the nasally doorman; her lanky, freckled arms bulging with uncollected mail. Her nose itched in the atmosphere change. Frigid air conditioning inside; damp, earthy winter outside. It made the long lines around Lily's navel and backbones paler and more transparent than they were. She had that tough kind of skin that ought to have been under sunscreen; her old summers were full of fair-weather friends who played volleyball, packed picnic lunches, and liked drinks with embarrassing names.

These kinds of memories lived for her in sunsets. The colors of them, that is—how night washed up slowly in LA, and everything on the beachfront bled into a more tender version of itself—from the water to the sand to the soft carroty mess of her hair, a slow-burn of orange to red, through which she used to watch the ocean. But those colors were goners. She stepped off an elevator and edged down mahogany halls, over Moroccan rugs, towards the place where a vampire lived.

It wasn't too strange to find her mailbox full. Ms. Woeburne got a _lot_ of letters and she occasionally forgot to check in downstairs. Bank statements, rolled manila packages, crisp envelopes stamped LACROIX FOUNDATION in intimating black. Lily didn't read the return addresses too closely. She weeded out any obvious junk and deposited it in a nearby chute before pressing the buzzer. It went: bing-bing.

No response. Lily jostled the haphazard heap of post before mashing down that little gold button again, harder this time. Nothing.

' _God, I hope she's not pissed off.'_

Lily broke a picture frame last week. Ms. Woeburne waved the accident away, but maybe she was madder than she let on. Chewing her lips made everything taste like chapstick. Exhaling, the thin-blood fumbled her phone out of a snug Capri pocket and dialed. The home number failed. And her mobile buzzed audibly from inside.

Lily now began to worry in earnest. No one like that leaves her cell unattended—not unless she'd packed up and fled the country. Maybe international disappearing acts are common for Kindred. She didn't know. She picked up a fist and banged it, called out. Nothing happened. Nobody came to check or see.

' _No way. Oh my god, not possible. Not this again.'_

There was a glimpse of an emptied-out bedroom in the back of her mind. There had been no letter left behind—no scribbled _I'm-sorry_ —just some old ticket stubs for a German train, shaken out of his suitcase and scattered on the rug. There was no way to even call him and ask where he'd gone. There was no answer when she picked up her fist and knocked hard on the door and said Ms. _Woeburne? Ms. Woeburne it's Lily are you there?_

There was an electric pulse of anger—an irrational feeling, she knew, of being left behind.

Fine tendrils tickled the thin-blood's forehead, an unpleasant itchiness, too much like what was going on inside her stomach. She shouldn't jump to conclusions. She shouldn't just assume the worst about people.

Except it wasn't the worst. What if something had happened to Ms. Woeburne? What if she hadn't skipped town, at all—what if she was lying comatose on the opposite side of this door in a pool of blood? _'I can't just stand here,'_ Lily decided, digging into her wallet for a library card.

There were surefire fines for breaking into the apartment of one's supernatural boss, but what else was she supposed to do? Saunter off and forgetting everything? That wasn't Lily. She might've been a little monster now, or so Rolf liked to say—smiling his mean pet name for her in an accent that would soon turn very cool—but she wasn't the kind of person who plugged her ears, shut her eyes, turned around. It was an important thing about her. It mattered. Not everyone needs a novel-length explanation why.

Imitating a shitty spy flick she'd seen last week, Lily jimmied the wedge of plastic between door and latch. She worked it around the locking mechanism, feeling edges bend, clueless and feeling pretty stupid. She shouldn't have been able to accomplish anything. She should've gone home helplessly, or at least got caught and arrested. But luck triggered in—and it must have tripped a trigger—and, with one tentative hand, it let her push forward into Ms. Woeburne's quiet suite.

No one was home.

Everything looked normal. The lights were dim and the den was neat; the leather furniture was smooth and dark; the idle PC sat on its unwelcoming desk. The empty fireplace was shut, television off. The kitchen bar gleamed with fresh Windex, uncluttered by foodstuffs; the solitary, stone-blue island was bare, save for one stack of unsigned papers she'd only read halfway. A footprint or two in the welcome mat. A cell phone sat innocuously on the glass coffee table, just abreast of an abalone shell, some weird catch-all. It was peaceful. Only the daylilies on her countertop showed signs of abandonment, white leaves curling brown at their delicate edges. Maybe Ms. Woeburne forgot to water them.

Lily set the mail under that ugly old snail of a centerpiece, then tiptoed around the rectangular sofa and towards her adjacent dining room. Unlike the lounge, which was all cold middle-tones over gray carpet, the hallway high-ceilinged and uncompromising hardwood. Its floor was merciless, freezing bare feet. Wicked tall lamps loomed like hangmen, black and vertical, over an unexplainably menacing table made of spotless red oak; it was wide enough to make the surroundings claustrophobic. Art deco framed barren walls. It was mildly unsettling in the way clean, brutal, costly places like this are.

Or maybe it was just the sense of being obsolete. A dining room is a space where meals are eaten. It joined the sad cabaret of other fruitless things, from refrigerator and toaster oven to a closet stocked with untouched toiletries.

At least they hadn't evolved out of bathtubs. Lily was working her way around the table and towards Ms. Woeburne's lavatory—a black-tile, mirror-ribbed chamber annex the well-kept master bedroom—when she stumbled over a pair of discarded heels.

And a sock?

And a coat caught, one sleeve inside-out, on the edge of a dining chair.

All right; there was no _way_ Ms. Woeburne would have left her home like this, business call or Mexico escape. Stubbing her toe, the fledgling picked each piece of clothing up and deposited them correctly: unbuckled shoes in a living room corner, loose sock (where was its mate?) in the hamper, jacket on a hanger. Relief was like iodine. _'She must've come home and passed right out or something,'_ Lily realized. Ventrue work hard, probably? It sounded reasonable to her, but that meant said Ventrue might be here, after all. As in: right now. As in: presently.

She petrified, teeth clenching, backpedaling for the front door.

_'God, Lily! Why? Who breaks into their boss's house? It was one missed appointment. Jesus. Now she's going to fire me, and I have it coming.'_

Her fingers were reaching for the door handle when a little irritation slowed them down.

I mean, it's not like she didn't have good reason to be worried. Not like a call ahead of time was too much to ask, here. It was honestly pretty damn rude to leave her hanging like this—thinking about murder and broken glass and craziness. It was super uncalled for to just cold-shoulder blow her off, you know? She must've really liked that stupid picture frame.

_'What a dumb thing to get so tweaked over. I mean, it's not like I didn't try to buy her a new one…'_

But Lily was a realist. Lily was a grown-up. Lily had definitely seen this before.

_'Wait,'_ Lily thought, and stopped herself short, scared to make the latch click. _'What if she's with somebody?'_

She'd been in college. She'd been twenty-two years old. Lily had died before everything happened to her—before anything happened to her—Embraced straight out of sophomore year. That the possibility an adult woman (adult as in grown; adult as in functional, forward-thinking, fully employed) was interested in the same sorts of things she'd been didn't dawn on her until now probably said enough.

She doesn't want to give you the wrong impression. It's not that Ms. Woeburne was unattractive—well, maybe she was—but it was the kind of unattractive that has nothing to do with physiology, and everything to do with everything else. Woeburne had what you'd think of as a cyclist physique, smoky eyes, synched belts and a somber, conservative sort of class. It was the passionlessness that did her in. She steamrollered all excessive stuff; she made no time for non-essentials. Her collars were always buttoned, her clothing intimidating but careful not to glorify anything. More than anything else, at all times, she looked like someone coming to arrest your boss for embezzlement.

Because she wasn't a Ventrue—not completely, not quite—the thin-blood couldn't really explain what sex-after-death was like. There was no way of telling whether or not they'd undergone the same bodily changes, not short of asking. (Lily was not going to ask.) She knew only that she didn't bleed anymore, that her body no longer reproduced its potential for another human being. But that in itself was not so consequential. It was nothing, honestly, next to the other things about her that changed.

(Maybe it was worse for males? E seemed mostly functional, but his blood was weedier than hers—weak enough to allow the jerk occasional pretzels or a bland bologna on rye. He was a sweetheart for not eating in front of her. For other things, too, but especially that.)

Anyway, it didn't matter, because Ms. Woeburne could've just as easily been with another woman. Which would have been fine. Lily left that crap-sack Oregon town for a reason, you know, not the least of those reasons getting away from bigoted hicks. She didn't mean anything offensive by it. She'd just sort of figured Ms. Woeburne for an undead lesbian, or something.

And shit, in that case, she could certainly forgive her for forgetting a courtesy call. Better to just leave—right now—and say nothing.

Leave, yes; say nothing, definitely; check, check, done. She could go back home and forget this stupidness. E had gently told her once: "You get really upset really quickly, is all." _Really upset, really quickly_. For a moment, for everything that had and had-not happened to Lily, the fledgling felt her fine hairs beginning to lift in a fine, animal line.

It was time to go. Past time to go. She picked up a piece of mail she'd dropped, she put it beneath the eye-sore shell, and she went.

So Lily couldn't explain why—just before stepping outside—she stormed back in, head pounding, and threw open that ominous bathroom door.

And saw the splintered mirror, the speckle of scarlet.

And Lily screamed.

"Oh my god," she said; it spilled everywhere. "Oh my god" as she retreated, staggering, ramming her bum into an edge of that daunting table. There was a hammering inside the bone wall of her chest. It didn't make sense. The adrenaline leeched out beneath spotted skin and the tight, stinging square of her diaphragm. The pupils went glossy and huge. Both hands leapt to her mouth, pushing "Oh my god" back in, as though she might scream again, but she didn't.

Lily whirled back into the den. She groped for the answering machine, finding it empty; she thumbed through the cellular, looking for someone who could be called. "Oh my god" was bouncing uselessly inside her brain. Ms. Woeburne's life might be in jeopardy, and that was merely on an off-chance she wasn't already a heap of cinder, roiling down a drain.

Lily looked closely, morbidly, at the shag carpet. There was no telltale dust. There were no follicles that could have once been female cells.

A sensation like fainting made everything feel clumsily light. The thin-blood found herself twisting around in Ms. Woeburne's desk chair, hoping for who-knows-what. Lily's palm trembled the mouse pointer. She must've been checking her e-mail before whatever happened did.

Lily's first click landed.

 

* * *

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: RODERICK DUNN**  
**DATE: MARCH 6, 2010 4:02 AM**  
**SUBJECT: PLEASE RESPOND**

Ms. Woeburne,

 

I've been ringing for the past several days, but I must keep missing you. Please contact me at your earliest convenience. I've received several house messages from one of the inner-city Harpies and I am quite frankly at a loss as to how to respond. Two of them are threatening messages. I am highly uncomfortable communicating with them directly and appreciate any guidance you are willing to offer. I really cannot stress this enough.

I know we've discussed this, but if you could find it in your patience and/or conscience to make an exception in this single instance, I would be excessively grateful. Thank you in advance and if there is any conceivable way I can make this up to you, say the word and I am your sworn man.

Once again, I am deeply sorry about the inconvenience, but as you can tell I am desperate for advice.

Please advise.

(Please.)

 

RODERICK DUNN  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
HENDON ESTATES

 

* * *

 

It didn't tell Lily anything, but it reminded her, just then, of what Woeburne's business _was_ ; there had to be something the boss of her boss could do. She managed to type in _Venture Tower_ for the number, then sandwiched the house phone between ear and shoulder, waiting. Her fingers shook. She sat through what seemed like three hours of loophole and hold music before reaching a live line.

_"Thank you for calling,"_ it chirped in crispy, ladylike French. _"You have reached the LaCroix Foundation, Los Angeles branch. How may we help you this evening?"_

Lily despaired at how much she sounded like someone who shouldn't be taken seriously. Her teeth were chattering a little. She forced one big rocky breath. "My name is Lily. Lily Harris. I think one of your employees is in serious trouble. I'm..." An exhale. A swallow. She tried to get a handle on it, but how do you explain bloody pieces of mirror on the floor? "I'm not sure what her job is, but I know she works for the LaCroix Foundation. Her name is Woeburne. I, um. I don't know the rest. It's Ms. Woeburne. She's some kind of lawyer, I think. I know she works for Sebastian La—"

The receptionist cut her off, abrupt and elegant. _"I'm sorry, miss. Who is calling?"_

"Lily Harris." Her name tasted feeble. "I'm a friend." (That wasn't quite right.) "Her maid. But I'm standing right here in her apartment, and I have no idea where she is. I know something terrible's happened to her. It's a mess. It's all broken up. The mirror's kicked in; it's all cracked. She needs help! I think she was abducted. I think someone must have taken her."

Silence on the receiver.

"Please, don't hang up! Don't hang up. You have to believe me. I know this sounds bogus, but I—"

_"The Foundation is not licensed to handle emergency calls. If you feel there is an immediate predicament, miss, you must hang up and dial an operator. Goodbye."_

She couldn't even spit out _stop_ before the line went dead.

Lily breathed. She stood up and breathed, sat down and breathed. Her body didn't need it, but the breathing felt mandatory, like something therapeutic, so the little monster let it happen. Air in, then out; in again; out again until she could not force her lungs to shrivel anymore. It was way too much. She doubled-over, oxygenated, mind reeling. Someone had to know. She had to find someone. There was no time to get sad or scared or let panic run her into circles. She had to think of something. She just had to go.

Lily stood up, shoving Ms. Woeburne's keys and phone into her jean pocket. She ran outside.


	18. Guessing Games

Nines was getting tired of it.

No doubt Ms. Woeburne would've echoed this sentiment—this kind of unparticular, aggravated exhaustion—if her mouth wasn't stuffed with a fistful of pipe cleaners.

They'd gagged then taped the Ventrue's jaws so that she could not bite and could not break off her teeth. There was very little air getting in and out. UnGeneva of them, absolutely—but S.W. had sort of scared them the last time, with the knife and that snap for a throat. Her canines stuck fast into the thick, artificial horse hair, which prickled ulcers into the surrounding cheeks, distracting freckles of pain. If the Foreman got your finger, she would've taken it off. She could have bitten straight down to the knucklebone.

Ms. Woeburne's ability to take things away, however, was somewhat dampened by the three fingers just now wrenched back to her wrist.

A strangled burst from the Ventrue's diaphragm and through her nose, muffled by the spines she couldn't spit out. It left her body as saline instead. The tears didn't roll; they ruptured. Her forearms jerked beneath the duct tape that held them to this metal chair.

Mistake, he said.

The Anarch's voice was callous; his look was crude, jagged tin, the kind that you dig up in Argentine mines. "You been making a lot of mistakes tonight, blueblood," he said—but Woeburne had too much salt in her body and softness in her mouth to make anyone who needed to bleed. "So I'm going to set up some expectations. Every time you try lying to me, I'm breaking a finger. When I run out—" He tapped. "I'm going to start taking them off."

Ms. Woeburne couldn't bear to look at her hand, twisted into a caricature of itself. The fingers had made a sickly, spongy _'krick!'_

Ventrue are a lucid type of monster—homicide, hydrogen-bomb lucid, the kind that obliterates bodies and leaves stencils in ash. Ms. Woeburne tried to her best to be. Baron LA had taken a few steps back and propped himself against one of the bleached basement walls; he was testing the pocketknife in his hand, unfolding the blade to give her a look. If she could get a hand free again, it would be a different story in here.

"See, it's the simplest thing. I'm going to ask you a few questions; all you have to do is nod 'yes.' Easy as pie. _Yes_ , Camarilla. You people are real good at yes."

Ms. Woeburne would've spat out her mouthful and told the Brujah to go to hell, but there was a fat, gluey strip of tape sealing everything in. The Ventrue seethed against her chair, nostrils flared with anger that had nowhere else to go. These naked lights were hurting. She'd rubbed her wrists pinkish against the chair, squirming and flexing, but it didn't help much. Skelter must've wrapped two full rolls around S.W.'s forearms before marching out to guard the door.

At first, the Baron stared at her across the empty room with no expression at all. She'd scowled, but a gulp hit her gut like a cold white stone.

The other Anarch had been a soldier. Ms. Woeburne preferred soldiers. She understood them. For a moment, our Ventrue felt distinctly as though she'd no hands left at all.

Do you know what the problem with the Brujah is? They have forgotten the fire where it started. They went to war too fast and burned up the beginnings of themselves.

"Let's go over what I know," the Brujah suggested, making a show of cleaning his nails with the tip of the knife. "I know you're an expat. I know LaCroix called you in; you've never been in my city before. I know the first thing you did here was slap down a false charge, and I know, more than the rest, you opened fire on me just as fast as you could. Your Prince found what's left of his charity Scourge. Is that right?"

Rodriguez hadn't glanced up. She knew this one was a test, a blank shot. So, less afraid of treason than of one of her thumbs rolling across the floor, S.W. nodded. One time—one _yes_. It was a compromise.

The nickel stare across the room intimated nothing. You might have lost the outlines of his face in the dark outside her overhead light. You wished you could lose the eyes. "Let's try another. He think it was us?"

Another yes. The nod plunked a leftover teardrop onto her blouse. She was dizzy; the screaming sensation had stripped itself in her scramble to process questions. Pain was now a pattern of dull, tacky throbs pulsing up her ulna. She let the air shirr out of her nose.

"He can't prove it." This was not a question. He dared her to 'yes' it. "Your Prince is under the delusion he can kill Statesmen as he pleases. And now I'm being asked—by a child of a man who kills children—to let one of you snakes walk away from me. So it might occur to you, Ms. Woeburne, that I'm not in the mood to play guessing games."

The following silence was not subtle. The rasping sounds of steel moving paused. She should not have glanced up to check. What would that knife noise, that _skritch_ , sound like against her bones?

"De Luca didn't scare us," the Baron added, like it was relevant, like an Anarch's fake courage means anything to a snake stretched out on a board. "Boot-licking corporate prick. Never should have been alive in the first place. LaCroix can vouch for that. And at least the last son-of-a-bitch he sicced on me slung a double-barrel. What the fuck does he think we'll do to you?"

She did not mean to, but Ms. Woeburne could not help it, and quickly looked away.

"Shit." The knife moved again. There was a scoff and he gave a conversant shake _no_. "Maybe I'm not the one ought to be sweating here, Cam."

"Grrgh-msfun-nnng!" Ms. Woeburne said. Hatred was bubbling up through the nerve endings in her eyes.

She was aware Rodriguez wanted to scare her, to bully her into a place where a betrayal here and there wouldn't taste so terrible. That made it no less arrogant. He'd left his wall to circle, but if he was trying to be a shark, he wasn't one of the classics. Not a White or a Blue, but the shallow-water kind that trawls in, leaving the deep sea, some dusky or tiger with a cold sense of humor that fell flat fast. It's hard for those species to subsist in open ocean with their bigger cousins. When you get one trapped on a sandbar, though—when you get one of those Great sharks stuck—the question becomes: what parts of this thing are still dangerous?

"After all this, I'm wondering one thing—and I bet you are, too. What good are you, Woeburne? Shit; you people aren't on the frontier out here. There's somebody else for this. So maybe you'd be asking right about now, you were in my shoes, or maybe in yours: Is this supposed to be some kind of Board tag-team, some backroom thing I am supposed to bite on? Or do you got a Plan C I am unaware of?"

Woeburne shrugged, eyebrows dark and angry. Her snort said it clear enough. _"How the hell should I know?"_

Nines thought about smacking her, but sort of believed this one.

"Scepter," the Baron sighed. He was directly across from S.W. now, who puffed up as big as she could for a person tied to a chair. One corner of mouth tape had gone gummy with saliva, curling away like dead skin. It was hard to forget how she had stolen the knife. "I understand you're a tool in all this. But I refuse to believe you're this useless."

The Brujah grabbed the peeling edge and ripped it off her face, leaving gooey tracks of adhesive. Ms. Woeburne sent a spit bullet at him the moment she had the leeway. It splattered impotently against linoleum. Her cankered palate felt as though she'd gargled a mouthful of Drano; the rag she'd hocked out was clotty with blood. The Ventrue held her tongue carefully between tender gums.

Rodriguez repaid her with one elbow upside the skull that humiliated more than it hurt. It was mostly reflex that had her snapping after the retreating arm. Teeth clapped air. But this time, S.W. realized exactly what it was she'd done a second afterwards—and grimaced in preparation for the inevitable knuckle-to-the-face.

' _What I wouldn't give for a sedative,'_ was a good enough last coherency before everything firecrackered white. Nines had neatly dropped the heel of his palm atop her set of crumpled fingers and flattened.

She heard the crack. But she felt nothing afterwards—not pain; not embarrassment; not her eyeballs locking back into their sockets, piranha-like. Everything from tricep down turned to nervous system static. Time went blocky and dull.

Ms. Woeburne was experiencing a bit of difficulty with the eyesight issue at present. Yet she could decipher the foggy outline of Rodriguez's nose, convex and threateningly close, and determined from that geometry he was perched before her sorry chair to look the Ventrue in her eyes. She closed them. Both the Baron's hands were sinking pitilessly onto hers—a weird, tumbling anguish that didn't hurt yet but you knew would soon, like fumbling free weights over your feet and watching them fall. She expected to find the switchblade nailing her to an armrest, jammed through carpals, but somewhere along the line it slid back into his pocket. His knees were bent, brows level, upsettingly patient. She should have thrown her head forward and butted his skull. Her limb was good as a time bomb now, ticking away until injured flesh could communicate what was done to it. He waited for the fuse to ignite before asking anything else.

When it did, Woeburne howled. She went hoarse in one shockwave of sound. Under that great heaviness, the Ventrue couldn't remember any decent words; she felt tongueless and crushed. She had never wanted to talk less.

"You're starting to smell like cinders, Camarilla," Nines observed. "Next time you feel like biting somebody, maybe rethink it."

The rumpled phalanges were nauseating to look at, worse to try and feel. To sit there and have to face your enemy's calmness was a petty horror. The thing about petty horrors is how they climb up over one another. Death of a Thousand Cuts. There was a simmering in her stomach. She tentatively tried swallowing, afraid it might make her vomit. Everything lagged on the hinge of her neck.

"I am not well. Listen to me. I am not," was all she could scrounge up in sixty seconds, and it sounded like the truth. Her pronunciation became murderously clear. "I am tired. I can't tell you. How tired. So, despite it, in spite of the thing—you really should believe me when I say that I'm not thinking clearly. I am not like myself." The Foreman winced away a hair follicle that shuffled into her teary left eye. She took one breath for the comfort of holding it inside her chest, wanting to cry. She didn't. It wouldn't have helped. "I am a little confused. But it seems to me that if you stood up, if you stopped this, and let me out of this ridiculous chair, that'd be it. That would do it, and I'll be on the next plane out, and we'd never have to worry about this problem ever again."

Nines didn't blink; did not move. He stared, a devil thoughtfulness, like someone who is holding a brick over an army of ants. "I can think of a few other ways I'd never have this problem again."

Ms. Woeburne finally decided it might be in her best interests to just shut the fuck up.

Strangely enough, it hurt worse when Rodriguez removed his hands. The sudden alleviation of weight made her sandwiched cartilage shriek joyously for its release. But because her bronchs were still raw, S.W. couldn't fuss about it. She let out the suffering with a damp, wobbly sigh, forcing down the boulder in her throat.

A Ventrue's best ploy is composure. They don't have the talons and the beaks of other predators, so for them, it's no trouble. It is no _trouble_ ; it is nothing to get upset over. A Ventrue is supposed to take the fear emotion and squeeze it until it drips all the animal stuff from the ugliest side of your mind. S.W. could usually find some humor in this expectation, but it was kind of a pity, too. Kind of a shame, and kind of a disbelief—that the best she could do on the edge of her life was sass like a teacher's pet. Not herself? No, the problem here is that Ms. Woeburne is too much herself-too sarcastic, too predictable, too sure-as-the-nose-on-your-face. It couldn't be stomached. She couldn't digest that, couldn't see the trigger pull on her ego or her life.

There's a short story. Tobias Wolff. Maybe you've read it for class; she did. In that story, there's a literary critic at one end of a gun—an analyzer who, even in the penultimate seconds of his life, cannot see past his numbers and his letters enough to remember himself still under all that. He does not feel his mortality like tender people might. He laughs, and then he dies.

You understand it, of course, at an intellectual level. Dying, such as it is. Being there, then not-being. You can cross your 't' and dot your 'i.' But for all you can predict with your charts and your experts and your hourglass, you are a Ventrue. You were picked out by The Empire. Something tells you that you should not die like the others do.

And maybe this is the hardest part to compartmentalize, for someone like her. Someone who looks the part, who talks the part, who lives the part—but who knows, deep down in the places only a bullet can reach, that her mother's ancestors are ghosts on the wrong side of a partition an Empire Race put down. She won't think about that, no. But there is dread in the quietest corners of herself. That one day, perhaps one of those ghosts will come loose and break open and scream—and that the sound of this truth will wake in her a resentment so real, she will no longer able to move seamlessly among these people, to count herself as one and believe it, to take up their rifles and flags. This kind of resentment will kill you, if you march with the empire. Everyone who has ever had to make herself smaller—or straighter—or lighter—or whiter—can appreciate what that kind of fear means.

So you laugh at the man with the gun. You had better.

Baron LA set the questions aside, gave her some breathing room. The Anarch's arms were folded, a standoffish posture, and it is a tense body that invests so much conscious effort into appearing relaxed.

"It's like this, Camarilla. There's a lot of better things I could be doing right now, so I'll give you a break," he offered. Ms. Woeburne suspected this was an entendre for what would shortly happen to her neck, but she had always been a killer pessimist, and pessimism had never killed anyone. Not for good. Not the second time, at least.

"I've had enough breaks," she began, a wisecrack that forgot what it was sassing about. He ignored her.

"Here's the best bargain you are going to get." And you hear this kind of thing everywhere, really; you do. It's the facade of fairness, the political gamble. He glanced nonchalantly at his dominant hand again. She was not sure what he could be looking for but the blood drying under his nails. "And I recommend you take it. We're going to do a little capitalism. Little free-market exchange, you and me, right here. Here's how this is going to work."

S.W. gave her duct tape a futile, resentful, stinging pull. "Don't think you have to explain how this 'works' to me."

"You got the next, say, ten minutes. I want you to sit there a couple of those minutes and figure out what you're worth. Draw yourself a little business plan. Give me your best pitch, Ventrue. Come up with something halfway interesting—some intel equal-price to what I think your head is—you get ten more minutes. So on and on and on, until we come to some kind of agreement. Or until you run out of time."

S.W.'s nostrils flared; one of them began to bleed again. You do not haggle with these people. You do not play the Free-State politburo's games. "I don't barter with terrorists. That is not in my practice. And you are not, in any way, going to read me my time. There is no agreement," she said, swallowing the trickle that ran back down her throat. "We do not agree."

"No other 'we' to this, Woeburne. This is laissez-faire trade, our private transaction. I honor that." His tone was awfully, awfully smug; _la-say-fare_. It was a whistle through the teeth, the easiest thing to tell someone who had no prospects. Her face was forlornly open, desperately hungry. "Those the party lines, right? You stay in this market long enough, don't default, we can talk about what it's going to take to get you out of here."

Nothing at the ends of her knuckles; nothing at the top of her spine. It was a lie, a dissident lie, a filthy presumptuous Anarch lie. But the Foreman began to shake despite herself. Her eyes dilated obviously. She did not believe him, but the thought of leaving, the chance at outside, was paralyzing. He might as well have thrown a hamhock before a lion starving on somebody's chain. With its taste in her mouth, a gulp hurt more than the pasty mess of workings in Ms. Woeburne's fist did. Lean possibility turned the pupils big and dark.

"I can't do that," she blurted. The despairing sound of her own voice made everything more painful. Woeburne's face tilted up to roll back the nose-blood, to hold in the tear swell behind eyes that were yawning humanly black. "You know I can't. This isn't something I can sell. I can't offer you anything."

"Bad news, Cam. Inflation. Price went up. Eight minutes."

Fear at the countdown to crash; anger at that apologetic shake of his head. "I don't have what you're asking for! This is useless. It's mad," the Foreman shrilled. Her cheeks were suddenly wet: two damp lines, broken and pink. There had been no drops. They were simply there. "You can't ask me to trade what I don't have."

"Just did. Seven."

"I'm not going to entertain this. I can't do it." Her healthiest hand gripped hard at all the armrest it could encompass. Brown fringes stuck to the tear marks, tangled lashes. The Prince's soldier shut her eyes and was whipping her chin insistently _no_. "I can't. C _an't_ , do you understand?"

"Do you understand your alternative?"

"Cut my fingers off. I'm not playing; I'm not saying anything; I'm not doing it."

"Going be at zero-hour without a dollar in your bank you keep up like this."

She had to stop to cry. It took forty-eight seconds.

"I know what this is; I'm not stupid," the Ventrue told him. She pent the sob that was coming. A dingy bristle of hair, a waterlogged snort. Her core hiccuped. She was not going to let the rest free. "There's nothing I can say. Even if I could, which I can't, it won't change anything. I'm a liability now. You can't bargain that down." Her breath came and went into tiny bits, a cobweb of cracks from a pressure point, stress like a boot on a window pane. When you pick up a snake—garden or rattler; it doesn't matter what kind—they will coil in on themselves like this. You'd think there's no bones in a serpent like that. They'll tangle up all their insides to get free, thrash like a scorpion does, but there's no barb there. You get a snake by the neck, they're done. For all that cunning, all that poison, the only weapon it has is its teeth. It's just teeth. If you can forget about the venom, the blueness, the history, stop being afraid—that's all that it is. Not unlike yours are, not sharper or smarter. Serpents act spectacular when they're clustered together—when they're in a tower with wolfhounds and spun gold, echoing like something divine, something can't be killed—but pry one away sometime, if you can. Get a kingsnake alone and you'll see what they are. Just regular teeth: the two hollow ones; the molars and eyes; the four baby ones she's got in the front, irregular perfects, not as they should be. Squeeze and a viper will go limp. Head forward, face down. The red funneled into that gulley of her top lip. "There's nothing I can do about it. You're going to kill me. You'd be an idiot not to. So no. My answer is no. I'm not going to give you a thing—not to not matter. Not to be killed."

There was a stitch of reason in the way the Anarch blinked at her. It was a hesitation you'd want to trust. She knew better and sucked the blood back into her nose, throat, tongue. "It's not inevitable," Baron LA told her, a fly-fishing line, a little light to remind you of the consequences of failure. "You ain't been killed yet, and I need a base in the court. Could be we can come to some sort of understanding about that."

The Ventrue chuffed skepticism, but the voice didn't steady, and the wetness didn't stop. "Just like that?"

"Something like that."

But the grief broke into a different thing, now. He'd pressed her too far, and she was all critic again, her natural armor. The Foreman was laughing—cheerless, miserable witch cackles. There wasn't even a point in feeling offended.

"Then that's really too bad! That's just—it's awful." Circles gouged around her sockets. One shoulder stretched to brush some teartrack away. "Because we do still have the unfortunate facts: the first fact that I know nothing of interest to you, and then the other one. That I won't. I won't tell you. I'm not involved in Mr. LaCroix's American enterprise; international figures won't mean anything. Not here, to you. So I guess I really am that useless." She sniffed and chuckled wretchedly on it. "Unless you're curious to know how much we pay in real estate. Then I suppose you've got me. Then I suppose I'm your snitch."

It was not a lie—not exactly, not entirely. S.W. is full of facts without meaning, figures with no faces, small brushstrokes that do not intersect when you are standing as close to the picture as she does. It does not matter if they scatter when her brain does, chicken eggs onto the floor. This is why she was made, do you know. There was a sledgehammer feeling in one of her forefingers. It made an arthritic, skeleton hook.

She didn't bother screaming this time; she withstood it. Her haunches leapt over her ears. The combined muddle of three prior fractures minimized the new pain, anyway, shucking it into some sort of cortisol fog. Ms. Woeburne was thankful. If it wasn't for that hideous sound—

A bad taste. She'd bitten her tongue.

Rodriguez, talkative few minutes ago, said nothing. He watched the Ventrue cough on her own blood, cringe, and internalize the collateral of a wound she'd self-inflicted. Diluted red stained the backs of clean incisors like strawberry pulp. She lamely maneuvered the muscle insider her mouth, a weak confirmation it was still in one piece. It hurt. Ms. Woeburne was a little annoyed it would bother.

Pull a snake out of their pit. Smash the sigil and crown. You will see what these First People are really made of—and you won't be so scared anymore.

"Cam, believe this: I am trying to solve your problem, but you just keep on lying to me." It sounded like he was a Harpy lodging a complaint at her desk—mildly irritated, speaking with exaggerated patience. The Ventrue fidgeted. Ms. Woeburne's mauled hand was beginning to plump up like an early Disney cartoon. _'You can't shoot a wabbit!'_

She said it again. "You're going to kill me."

"Maybe," the Brujah agreed. Her liver still sourly hurt with the outline of his fist. "Imagine you got a better recommendation in that regard."

She glared at the ceiling light and took another inhalation of her own blood. The arteries stood out in the tendons and riggings of her neck. "None. Kill me."

"Can't be your first choice. Get creative," Nines suggested, as though they were coworkers brainstorming over stale muffins and flashcards. If you're a good interrogator—someone who plans on getting what they want—you'll stomp all over the ego, but protect a few tiny hopes. The dead have to believe they can change what's around them, that they can live; they have to guard that last square of control with everything left. That truth is more than a torture philosophy. It is more than a guessing game. "You help me here, we can figure something long-term, maybe see about ransoming you back."

That Good People brio was slumping; her company colors, graveyard dust and platemail and black coffee, were drained. "No. I'm not going to be your bargaining chip, and there's no point in keeping on like that. Like I don't realize. You aren't going to profit from me. None of you are. He isn't going to pay it. You believe this: I know what's happening here. It's not a question to me. I told you, and so you should know. I'm not going to play these stupid games. And even that is beginning to seem preferable to sitting here and listening for an age while you make a show of how very _fair_ you are."

Brujah teeth—cruel grin, mocking camaraderie. They were a doglike white. "Got a little of that martyr thing, senator."

"I don't have anything," she rasped. The blood behind the cuspids eked in droplets. She made no effort to hide it anymore. Hurting a blueblood is like boiling leather—the bubbles rise in the hide. The depression was immense and deadly. She could have torn out a throat with her nails, thumbs, fists.

"It kills you, doesn't it? Mustn't it? Because I think it does," she managed, and shook, and swallowed hard to chase the inside stuff away. "Nothing you can do is going to matter. Not in the long game. Not for good. It won't make you better than us. Nothing will—and everybody knows this—nothing's going to let you win. Smash every bone I've got. What will that do for you? Please." Ms. Woeburne shot a contemptuous look through her taken-apart hair. "You call _me_ a martyr, like that's something to be embarrassed of. You have one more breath. Your people lost, your ancestors did, and so did you. The plain fact is that you've never won anything." The prophecy made her metallic. Prophecy might get her a crowbar in the brain, but she was going demolish it, whatever it was—she was going to dissolve that undeserved grin from his face. "So, yes. I am telling you to kill me. You've still done nothing at all."

That was easy, at least. The smile was gone.

The Anarch stood up, right off that wall. His stare was an inhuman temperature, and he said, stiffly, "These are _your_ rules, Cam, not mine. I did not invent this. I am one side of a war. Difference between you and me is that I didn't fling myself into the line for a couple grand, for a shot at what. I didn't let a king remake me just so I could squeak by. Think you'd have the privilege of thinking, your people get their way? I don't care what the fuck you think, snake. This is a Free—"

"Fuck your State," she woofed. The blood from her nose and her throat spat out on the floor. "The difference is winning and losing. If that's the only thing you've got to throw at my feet, Rodriguez. Mr. Rodriguez, you are lying, and you are wrong. And you're a hypocrite. You're a king in a rebel's mask. That is pathetic."

"I tell you what's pathetic, you brainwashed bureau piece-of-shit. Fascist-fucking waste of—"

"It's a fraud—everyone knows that. Don't you know that everyone—"

"—for a bitch on a short leash, you got a lot to—"

"Wolf-Prince."

That did it.

Two words. It roiled the wolf-Prince beneath his armor coat. The Baron's eyes went blacker than they should have been, and before she could feel afraid, the wellspring of temper was all over the floor.

She was on the floor.

Literally. He upended the chair, one metal explosion, and then there was a handgun pointing at Ms. Woeburne's head.

"Fuck you, snake"—it rolled through the teeth like a wood saw. "You 'Mr. Rodriguez' me one more time, you're gonna be looking at a lot less above your motherfucking neck. Sitting there choking on your own blood, and you think you're better than me? Fuck you. Stuck-up, pompous-ass Ventrue bitch. I'm done with you. Rot there. "

There was a sliver of slight before Ms. Woeburne closed her eyes and it all went dark. There was a blunt ringing and she waited several nonsensical seconds to be killed.

By the time she realized the bullet wasn't coming, the door slammed.

But everything was still skewed, still side-a-ways. There was a mean-spirited pinch between the Ventrue's shoulder blades. There was a nauseous medley of saliva and nasal drip and commingling back up her sinuses. _'Are you kidding me?'_

"Are you kidding me?!" she screamed, but no one answered, and when she pulled at her chair, it wouldn't give.

The lightbulb didn't make much difference, Ms. Woeburne decided. In a room with yourself and your mistakes and your stomach, it is all very stale and dark.


	19. The Mechanicals

Mlle. Lefevre glanced up from her keyboard to a palette of freckles and a mop of orange hair.

"Can I help you?" she asked, aiming the finely-tweezed eyebrow of obligatory interest. Lily recognized the voice.

' _Suck it up. Do it for Ms. Woeburne.'_

"I hope you can." And she tried to rein the story in, but everything came out head-over-heels. The fledgling stood on her sneaker toes, clammy fingers unthreading her shirt seams; she looked more like a teenager than a vampire. She was painfully aware of that, and struggled to sober herself. "Please listen. My name is Lily Harris. I spoke to you on the phone a while ago. I was calling about my boss—" A dry mouthful. "My employer. I told you about how I think she's gone missing, and I know she works here. For the LaCroix Foundation."

The taps of white nailpolish on black counterface might've scared somebody else away. The thin-blood in the sophisticate gleam of tower lobby was like a drop of water in milk.

How curious. Lefevre hesitated with her finger over the security buzzer.

Protocol insisted on notifying security after all unscheduled arrivals. But tonight it would've been a joke; the miserable "watchman" they'd hired for the front door—a scarecrow to breathe, blush, flatulate, and other obscenely human things—was incompetent. He'd come trotting over like a happy hippopotamus at the slightest provocation. Little pig's feet and antiperspirant and ballpoint click-pens in his breast pocket. Always a misfortune to involve him.

Lily stood before Joelle, rumpling handfuls of ratty tank-top, standing with tennis shoes upon flat, heavy feet.

Mlle. Lefevre folded both hands beneath her perfect point of a chin, leant forward against the desk, and offered an uncaring Covergirl coral smile. Long lashes closed then opened. The caramel up-do glistened like wet skin. Lily was reminded of a Swarovski crystal porpoise she'd had once as a child.

The fear came back—fear of that splintered mirror, that hollow apartment, the brittle flower leaves drying on island tile. She had to at least try.

"I'm not making this up," Lily swore, leaving palm prints on immaculate enamel. The sight of them cooling there turned Joelle's smacking grin a few notches south. "I work for Ms. Woeburne. Woeburne. I know she has an office here. Her apartment is in Empire Hotel, number 3B. I was just there, and it's… it just looks like somebody grabbed her. I don't know. Everything was left on, her keys, the… the mirror's all smashed. It's a mess. A mess." Silly thing grabbed at her neckline, wringing fabric, tying poly-blend knots.

Joelle tugged on a cherry-red sleeve. An oversized bangle glistened on the crane's neck of a wrist. Lily felt like she might cry.

"We appreciate your interest in our personnel," said Mlle. Lefevre, her boredom more earnest than the speech was. "Ms. Woeburne is, however, unavailable, and cannot be contacted without an approved appointment along with proof of your association."

"I don't have an association. You're not listening to me," Lily blurted. Her fists were ineffective and pinkish where they'd balled up on the counter. She waited for something to happen to her.

This is why it is good practice to hire Caitiff—the waiting to be happened-to. Joelle had never seen Lily Harris's face in-person before, but she managed Foundation domestic staff, and she liked to keep the little people out of trouble where it was possible to do so. It is a touch of charity, at best, to employ such a creature. They are easily replaced, at worse. What else do they have to do.

Mr. Toten's head had fallen off Nocturne's stage not long ago. Rolf wept under his execution hood like a little boy. She did not think anyone had told the leftover Childe why it was Ms. Woeburne ever had her name.

"Then we are dealing with two problems, madam, not just the one." Concern on that face, carmine on the body, pleasantness in the voice, and Lily thought it might start laughing at her. She stiffened hard and fought down her urge to shout.

"I'm trying to tell you that one of your people—one of you people—is in big trouble. She could really be hurt. She could be— _dead_ ; I don't know! You have to do something about this. Woeburne. Ms. Woeburne. You have to do something. You can't just blow it off like I never came in here."

Lefevre raked her loud lapels straighter, mouth pursing imperceptibly. Irritation is unbecoming an attendant of her particular position, who likes everything in her way from sundown to sun-up to go smoothly—Joelle more than most. Irritation is the most common emotion she feels. "If this is an urgent or criminal matter, Miss… Harris, was it? Yes." Another forced smile. "Miss Harris, you really must take it to the authorities. Foundation employees—myself included—are not licensed to pursue vigilantism. Thank you for coming in. Goodbye."

"I can't talk to the cops about a fucking vampire _,_ " Miss Harris began to say, but the vampire at the desk said ah, _shhh_.

Lily stared in that lobby for maybe a minute. Her blank face conveyed outrage her lineage would not dare. A drop of water in milk does not stay water very long. Its substance is compromised; it has to blend.

Lily looked around. Everything was terribly clean. There were black ceiling fans turning silently overhead. The floors were newly-waxed and their reflections shone dully in obsidian. A group of three cold-shoulder capitalists—who knew if they were supernatural—stepped into an elevator and disappeared. Someone was pushing a squeaky cart into a janitorial closet she couldn't quite see. It was disturbingly quiet, fearsomely civil, the kind of barrenness that gives you goosebumps. There was no one to speak with. Lily craned her neck, trying to see deeper into Venture's entry lounge than the colossal pillars or dark tile would allow.

"Excuse me, miss; so sorry. But may I ask what it is you are looking _for_?" There was nothing friendly or patient about the way Mlle. Lefevre asked.

"Is there an intercom in here?"

Joelle's impossible eyebrow arched itself into a small architectural marvel. The Toreador's fine hand, however, was not fast enough. Lily reached halfway over the long counter. It was a jumble of action; the marble pushed in her stomach, and she had to hop forward to grab for the microphone post, but god damn it, she got it. Lefevre jumped back as though expecting to be touched. It would have been a bigger offense than commandeering some wires.

"HELLO?" Lily tried into the snake-wire receiver she'd wrenched towards her mouth. "Hello; is anybody there? I need to talk to someone else."

Joelle's pretty fingers were cruel as they wrestled the microphone away. The Toreador's grip was stronger than it should have been. The word was equally so when Lefevre leant over, gently cleared her throat, and spoke into the silent black crosshatch: _Security._

They struggled with each other a few more moments, until the elevator doors beeped open, and out strolled the night shift frontman.

Bernard Krantz was an able sort. He traversed these spit-shined hallways (well, at least the first three public floors) every weekday night and sometimes Saturdays, black shoes clapping authority, thumbs hooked through belt-loops, a lawman's swagger. That gait was the purposeful motion of a man who knew exactly what he wanted. In his confidence was a long history of officership; in those feather-brown eyes, justice for little people. Men like him are a species, he likes to think—John Wayne, Paul Revere, Casey Jones—servants and peace-keepers and everyday folks.

The best way to walk that line is with humility. Humility, but with a message. And with what Bernie liked to call the "Four 'S'-es": strength, strategy, social graces and, of course, security. It's not just trigger-pulling and intimidating on these streets. To do what he did, and to do a good job, you have to be armed in more ways than one.

Well, "armed" in the sense of "equipped," that is—the LAPD is pretty strict about regs. for packing actual heat.

The officer blinked, assessed the situation, and cleared his throat. "What," he asked, "seems to be the problem here, ladies?"

Joelle stomped a stiletto neatly into Lily's big toe. The thin-blood let out a yelp and gave up the microphone.

"You can't be serious," Mlle. Lefevre snapped. Having won back the loudspeaker, she stalked around her barricade of desk, returning to that empty chair, porcupine bristles and the indignation of being a better thing. Lily cursed and tied to take weight off her injured foot without losing complete credibility. It floundered in comparison with how her adversary rebuckled a strawberry ankle strap and pressed flat two loose strands of smooth, pitiless hair.

"Here—a trespasser," Chunk was told. "Take her out of this building. Stop standing there!"

The Toreador would never understand how Mr. LaCroix expected this sponge-cake to keep her safe. Of all the wrongs Prince LA had done her, this one she took the most personally. Joelle took almost nothing personally. She did consider most things offensive, but they were small-minded things by small-minded people—no longer worth her time.

"Don't you worry, Ms. Lefevre. I've got this under control." Joelle looked wroth with the world from her spotless perch. He said her name _Lah-furv_.

That established, Krantz held up both palms, a treaty and a gesture to settle down. Neither one of them particularly did.

"Listen, Missy," he warned Lily, who was too busy with her toes to put much into diplomacy. She hopped a bit. "I don't know what's going on, here, but if this fine lady says you're trespassing, you're trespassing. I'm going to have to ask you to take a step back from Ms. Lefevre, there, and calmly vacate the premises. Otherwise, I'll have to radio this in for an arrest." One finely-boned hand patted the walkie-talkie at his belt for dramatic effect.

Lily almost bared her stubby set of eye teeth at him, but realized mid-snarl what she was doing, and licked her lips instead. "Arrest me?" Her face went a watery, furious red. She wasn't sure why she cared so much. God, she shouldn't have. It was something she had to do. "Arrest _me_? I'm not doing anything wrong! I came here for help."

It was never a bad idea to open nonviolent negotiations; Big Bro always said so. His older brother was NYPD. Besides, even if he wasn't: Bernie was a gentleman. "I'm sure there's no call for that. We're all reasonable people, and we don't want to cause any trouble for each other on this nice night. Isn't that right?"

Neck taut and turned away and long as a Roman painting—Roman as most of this place was—Joelle looked beyond ready to dispose of both the thin-blood and the guard. But not until after she'd seen to herself. Elegant palms fixed the already perfect gingerbread bun. It bought Lily a few seconds of time.

"Look, you're a cop," she said, too angry to care if it was a reach. "Let's talk about obstruction of justice. I need to see someone. Someone _else_."

"Ma'am," he instructed her, "please lower your voice and take a deep breath. I need to document this before we proceed to legalities." Bernie reached for a notepad, tugging it out of his back pocket. Precise fingers flattened crinkles out of lined yellow paper. "Believe me, I don't want to make problems for anybody, and I appreciate you have your own concerns. Better we keep our heads, talk about this, then all of us can go home. You can call me Officer Chunk. Now, would one of you ladies kindly explain to me what happened so I can make a record for my superiors?"

Lily and Joelle balked at the same time. Officer Chunk was scribbling industriously into his flip booklet.

"One at a time, now," the guard said. It's important not to set yourself up as the enemy. You have to be gentle, especially with some of the female persuasion, but not too soft. Firm but understanding. That's the balance and it has to be respected.

"I am going to put this as clear as I possibly can for you," Mlle. Lefevre said. Hers was condescension, misanthropy, and decades of mildly loathing everything around her. "It is very simple. This girl lacks an appointment, and apparently can't be bothered to make one. She has no reason to be here. So she has concocted some outrageous story in order to get attention. Remove her and I can continue my work."

"Like I said, Ms. Lefevre: everything's under control. You can get right back to your duties. I'll take this from here."

Joelle might've been furious if either of them were worth it. Because they were so evidently not, she disengaged, dropping back into her chair on rickety heels.

"Now, let's go over some things." The man's brows climbed his forehead, inching towards that Q-ball of a head, where through a stringy front of hair you could see the reflection of overhead bulbs. "You claim to have business here, young lady, but I've got an employee telling me otherwise. You realize that I take Ms. Lefevre at her word. Is it as she says?"

"Like hell it is," Lily rumbled, startling at how much that sounded like Ms. Woeburne. The thin-blood's hands clenched against pale jeans, temper crackling, a sound in her head like breakfast cereals she used to eat. "I already told this bitch what I was—"

"There's no need for profanity, ma'am."

"Sorry," she spluttered. Joelle, well into the realm of noncaring, steamed silently. Her fingers were smacking the keyboard with outrageous speed. "But I did already say that I didn't need an appointment. I'm only here because my friend works for the LaCroix Foundation. And I think she's been..."

 _Is it as she says?_ Lily wanted to run out of that apartment screaming 9-1-1 at every squad car. She needed to share the horror of the thing with someone who could solve it. But she wasn't positive someone like her ought to talk about this—not to anyone who lacked the live, wet-earth smell of Kindred, and to anyone without the sunken face to match.

Officer Chunk considered himself a Renaissance man. Which was why he generously ignored her accidental "bitch," pocketed his notebook, and bounced the click-pen to a close. Both hands were nonchalantly at his belt. It was a six-shooter's stance.

"Well, missy—you understand I'm going to have to escort you off the site. For security purposes. But, circumstances being what they are, I don't think there's any need to make this official." Chunk waited patiently for the tears and choked relief. Relief looked more like a wordless stare. "Now, I don't know what you're doing up and about so late over here, ma'am. And to be honest, maybe it's better that way. You'll have to leave. But I'm like any Old-Fashioned Frank in that I just don't feel right about sending a kid packing all on her lonesome in the wee hours, there. Can I escort you safely to public transportation, or to your automobile?"

Lily, who had never heard of "Old-Fashioned Frank," didn't say anything right away. Her brain felt like was tripping up a flight of stairs. "Um," she decided, lips smacking. "No. No, that's OK. Really. I'll go. I'll just go. I'll be fine."

Chunk heard the nerves and misinterpreted them as fear. "Don't worry, young lady. It's all a part of the job." Gallantry. The cliché kind, too. "My shift doesn't technically end for another fifteen, but if you'll only give me a minute, I'll check with Ms. Lefevre, here…"

One glittering hand whipped up from behind the lobby desk, brushing him off like shoulder crumbs.

"I had a hunch she wouldn't mind. That's all set, then. There's a bus stop just down the block. I'll see you off, and then from there, you can just get yourself home," he told her. Lily watched with increasing dismay as her self-appointed chaperone walked to those daunting double-doors, hefted them open, and waved toward the cool sidewalk outside. "After you, missy."

Lily could feel a Toreador sneer at her back when they left.

It was depressingly hot for a winter. Some things never change.

There was a weirdness outside, a sense of something. It felt like a heavy season beneath the palm leaves, and she willed down a need to turn back beneath the tall black figureheads of Venture Tower. Lamposts glared from the corporate garage next door. Across the street, gargoyles loomed on the public library, steel sentinels painted in false gold. None of them offered her anything, either. Lily hadn't looked at those statues much, even before she'd died; she had stopped looking at the way the orange trees flowered and twisted different shades of green; she hadn't looked twice at the human being behind her, his footfalls slapping, moving in an assistant principal way that had to be hard on his knees. She didn't see so much as hear the traffic skreak by. It tasted like a night that would change you—grow you new limbs, illness to make you glow.

The worst thing about this city is the climate. Three-hundred days of sunshine wanting to kill. LA is stagnant save for when it storms, and when the Gloom cooks out of sidewalk rubber, a wetness weighs everything down. She'd always hated that. She missed real March, full of late blizzards with grudges, and the way snow sticks to windows like these. It was about to flurry back home, said the weather reports. Lily still checked them. Her bare shoulders felt like they'd burn in the dark. Her bones seemed to hurt in thundershower air. Rain would only make the smog thicker, only make the temperature broil.

Perpetual summer. Some things ought to remember to the way they were before.

"So what exactly was all that you were saying about your friend, there, missy?"

In that interim, the officer'd caught up to her—and it strained him a little, though he tried not to show it. Chunk coughed subtly into his fist to regulate his breathing. Lily felt bad about walking so fast; she wiped at her forehead as though there'd be sweat. "It's nothing," she said, automatic, wanting badly to say anything else. "Forget it."

"You get yourself into trouble? I'm sure the fine people of the LAPD can offer you protection of some kind over at the station downtown." (Bernie knew how hard it sometimes was, even for honest kids, to avoid the gang-bangers and general riffraff. He was not a judgmental badge.)

"It's not me." Her rear teeth touched uncomfortably. "My boss. She's... I mean, she's a good person. I think. I don't know her all that well; I just…" The swallow hurt going down. "You know how good people can get sometimes get caught up in big messes?"

"That would be due to a lack of social programs caused by irresponsibly-balanced public budgets. But as for your friend—uh, no. I reckon I'd know a lot better if you gave me some background."

Lily inhaled for the feeling of oxygen, the way it was cradled by her lungs. It all came back out in a wheeze. She couldn't imagine this person with his wilting comb-over, collar stuck to his throat, and gruff breathing made for much of a threat, but you can't take risks. But you can't let things blow away. But you can't just ignore it. Maybe she could make up some intricate lie…?

"I can't talk about it here. Where's your squad car?" Lily asked, glancing towards the parking complex sandwiched a block down.

Officer Chunk chewed on his pen cap. He'd taken it out to scratch notes. "It's, um. It's parked somewhere else right now. Look: let's just set ourselves down, here, and you can tell me the full story." He nodded towards a sad-looking bus stop.

Lily pondered turning around and bolting for it. But the window to quit came and went; minutes later, she was surprised, and a little confused, to find herself sitting on the bench, cheap wood chilly against two bare calves. An ambulance howled nearby. Gasoline spill smell and shitty imitation tacos made her stomach ache. Chunk—that ridiculous name for this ridiculous guy—was leveling her a look of expectation. It couldn't hurt. It couldn't hurt worse than—

Indecision had to go. The thin-blood sucked in one useless breath. "OK, fine," she got out, hands clenching, and by now, they were beginning to feel sore. "Yeah, I'll tell you. But you have to promise to keep this a secret."

The chance at being a confidant to some troubled inner-city kid seemed to inflate his gallantry windbag even further. "You can count on me, missy," he pledged, and waited, listening, ears buzzing in the quiet.

Three full taxis passed them without stopping. One #34 bus had already flashed its headlights down the street.

"My friend. She… she works for the government." Lily realized how sad it is that an old movie monster can convince no one else to give her the time of day. "No, you don't get it. I mean _the_ government. She's a real higher-up. CIA, maybe. I'm not sure. Maybe higher. But no one else can know about her. Ever. For any reason. You can't compromise her. It would be really, really bad. It might jeopardize homeland security!" She pulled out the decade's proverbial big guns.

Chunk wore a barefaced look of shock, and it took him a moment to wrench his eyebrows back to their normal resting position. Lily couldn't believe how seriously he'd taken her. Rolf was right; fucking with humans was easy. Who knew if he could help, but she had to do something. She had to.

Chances were pretty bleak; it probably wouldn't work; but Lily could live with herself and move on if she just _tried_.

She had to try.

"I was supposed to meet Ms. Woeburne a few days ago. Run some laundry, clean up for her. I'm a housekeeper. But that didn't happen, because she never cancelled, or called me, or contacted me in any way. I finally just went over today. God, it's—sorry. It's a disaster. Somebody broke into her apartment. Somebody took her, I think. Kidnapped her. Abducted." It still felt surreal to say. Moonlight bounced between the pavement, the streetlamp glass, the cop's flushed neck. She could hardly believe this was about to just roll off her tongue: "Do you want to—you know? Come take a look at the place, or something? I was just there. I was just going to go home."

There hadn't been time enough to remove the keycard from her pants pocket before he straightened up—eyes narrowed, mouth thin—and proceeded to make one thing clear:

Officer Chunk is on the case.


	20. Data Pending

URGENT  
PERSONNEL FILE UPDATE

CITY OF LOS ANGELES

AGENT STATUS REPORT  
to be annexed to the employment record of  
S M WOEBURNE

FILED BY  
JOELLE LEFEVRE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES

MARCH 10 2010

**DRAFT.**

**TEMPLATE IN PROGRESS. TO BE DECLASSIFIED AND PUBLISHED UPON COMPLETION.**

**FINAL DATA IS PENDING.**

 

STATUS OVERVIEW

Agent is **[DATA PENDING]**.

 

POSITION SUMMARY

Ancilla. Hendon Estates, Chief Supervisor. Los Angeles Board, interim Aedile (pending). Full voting and floor rights. Agent is in good standing.

Clearance level: N/A. EXCLUSIVE.

Agent reports directly to the Offices of the Prince.

 

CURRENT ASSIGNMENT

Agent is stationed in LOS ANGELES.

Agent is **[DATA PENDING]**.

 

RECENT HISTORY

Agent was recently transferred to the Los Angeles for full Board instatement. Primary responsibilities include all matters relating to sensitive personnel incident reports (see casefile: VICTOR DE LUCA), various clerical roles, and advising executive branch on appropriate punitive measures.

ATTN: Agent recently testified via written investigation that the death of Victor de Luca (see casefile: VICTOR DE LUCA) constitutes murder in the first-degree. Agent recommended full charges be levied before the Board, and maximum (corporal) sentencing pursued.

 

REASON FOR UPDATE

On Wednesday, March 10, 2010, at approximately 2200 PST, LaCroix Foundation employee and Camarilla agent S M Woeburne was reported missing by an independent informant. Field operatives have failed to locate agent and property search has been inconclusive. Incident will be recorded and agent status presumed as per organization guidelines.

Foul play is suspected. No suspects have been named at this time.

Full investigation is pending.

 

Addendum: Search has been CANCELLED as of Thursday, March 11, 0100 PST.

 

RESULT

Agent is hereby released from the Offices of the Prince of Los Angeles and terminated from the LaCroix Foundation, effective immediately.

 

REASON FOR TERMINATION

Agent is deceased.


	21. The Old Regime Rules

You can only chew through so much duct tape.

Ms. Woeburne's jawbone had been liquidated. It felt that way, at least—but she didn't let hurting stop her. Hurting, if anything, is a call to speed up. Slow-walkers feel the pain in their heels far more than sprinters do.

She bent her face back to her arm and she chewed.

Not the arm.

The tape. The duct tape.

Somehow the teeth kept gnawing away. S.W. chose not to feel the way her individual neckbones ached, the way her nose ran until it burned, the sore mouth. Why would you ever elect to feel that stuff—that your face is a wet plaster mush, that you are made of ticky-tacky? So her teeth kept at it, and with every bite, weak patches broadened in the makeshift handcuffs. Eventually they'd be weak enough to writhe a bit and burst through. First step, chew; second step, snap—yes, cadets, this is how you make it—rocking her trapped arm as much as she could left-to-right. One roll was down to half its original girth, thready strings popping out, strips sagging like old skin.

Good riddance, too, because duct tape is not only hell on the jaw, but it tastes absolutely terrible.

Ms. Woeburne had been squirming, chomping, and grinding at this uncomfortable horizontal for the past three hours. They'd abandoned her, it seemed, to starve. Starvation seemed far away. It, too, is something you just do not opt-in to feel.

Don't loiter. Move.

Don't hesitate. Commit.

Next objective: stand up. Once S.W. managed to tear an arm free, she'd tumble halfway out of this God-awful chair and right herself. The notion sparked a fizzle of optimism that kept her gums gnashing on.

Post-next objective? Ms. Woeburne honestly couldn't give much of a damn—not while residual blood was still rushing to her head in fat, disorienting pulses. She puffed a sodden fork of hair off a badly-bruised nose.

If she was forced into a guess (something the Foreman hated to do), she'd guess this: two more hours. Maybe it would be daytime. Sunlight puts a fast stop to a vampire jailbreak, but it would also prevent Anarch interrogators from carrying out any unfortunate second-thoughts before she could come up with the final leg of her plan. It would give her more time. Which was decidedly a lucky thing. Really, though, it was.

A basement, blunt weapons, and blunt insults; screws digging into her spine; an afterpang of bone meal, a foretaste of ash. She had talked to herself in the black thrash of panic. _All right; it's all right; you're all right._ Count sevens and elevens. Keep away from sharp edges and let out short breaths. Gain perspective, reel back from what is around you, take it apart. Pull the room to bits and see what is tractable here. When a Ventrue's eye begins to wander, to stray beyond your shoulder or your hands, it is time for the lesser species to worry. They are calculating how to move around you. They are drawing butcher lines to divide your pieces and inventory all the places to put teeth.

Ms. Woeburne is a fine Ventrue. She is as Ventrue as you would have been, were you in her position, in the genepool of tall boots and stout rules. She can assess it from a distance. She knows it is not her prerogative to withstand someone else's abuse. She was dirty. She was all-in. She was matted with finger blood and she twitched and she stank, and frankly, she was getting very fed-up.

 _Fed-up, tuckered-out, all-in._ These things she says are sugar pills. They are a substitute for 'terrified.' A corporal does not acknowledge terrified. Giving room to your terror will destroy you. You must slam the door shut on terror. Squeeze it back in, clench your teeth, and put your head somewhere else.

She yanked out a gunky length of tape with her canines, spat it aside, and had just returned for another bite when there was a sound.

Standing alone, it wasn't a particularly threatening sound. Had Ms. Woeburne's situation been a little less dire and her senses a little more upright, she probably wouldn't have invested much in it. A tiny sound, comprised of bits: a squeak of hinge, the scuffle of plastic soles, weight shifting across concrete. She'd shrugged off more menacing noises in these past few nights. Hell, she could've overlooked her eyesight, too—the brief, sorry sickle of moonlight. It was a breath that furrowed her brow before disappearing, again, sucked behind that ominous door. It was nothing noteworthy. It was nothing, really, at all.

But Ms. Woeburne spotted it.

As did she spot the monster. He had the poker scowl of people who enter your life with bad intent.

Having contended with Free-State knives and Free-State guns and, of course, let's not shortchange the Free-State fists, S.W. had no reason to be particularly impressed by a Brujah boy at this interval. He was red hair and adolescent stubble like fire ants and crinkly unironed clothes. He a few pockmarks over a bunch of knuckles. Two hands, that's all, attached to a body that seemed to hang between them while the two arms stood out. Ten fingers, a decent pair of thumbs. They were rapidly clenching then unclenching, tensing themselves at his tattered khaki pockets.

Maybe there was more of him to see, but she didn't. It was dark and then bright and then dark again, and Ms. Woeburne was a little more concerned with being in this room with an insurgent she didn't know than she was worried about inventorying anything else.

"And who in the hell are—?" She didn't finish. Those knuckles were suddenly in her mouth.

Don't bother looking for the grand philosophy here. This is what Brujah do when they cannot find answers for the questions you ask. If you are a part of the structure—or if it looks too much like you, with picked-clean nails and amber cologne—these people need no real reasons to cause you grief. And she'd given them reasons. So the Foreman should have predicted it.

She also should've felt uneasy to be discovered with tape glue all over her face, but all those messy escape efforts were suddenly a little beside-the-point. Point being: he'd been glaring very deliberately somewhere in the vicinity of her breastbone. A small man, a corpse of perhaps one-hundred-and-fifty pounds, but Ms. Woeburne decided that she did not care for that corpse that sort of fixation. No, hard swing. Not at all.

Without explaining who the hell he was or why, the little bastard pounced full on S.W. there in her unhappy seat.

The chair banged where it hit cold linoleum floor.

You might venture a guess—because she does not like to—as to what, exactly, an Anarch whelp stands to gain by ripping out an older Ventrue's throat. Her hands were crumpled and not terribly strong. This is not just an act of innocent everyday murder, and so she cannot call it "just revenge"; you can get revenge on a Scepter easily enough with spear heads, with broken necks, with false bargains and worse confessions. This is another thing. Her knee bucked but did not find a real mark. In the game of Jyhad, there is a corporate bureau stacked between a Foreman and her death; but here, there was only the shallow flesh of throat alone.

 _Blue_ is an insult and it is a claim. Neither definition makes her life more or less than what it is.

Her limbs strained to liberate themselves from the ones that crushed them down. Yes, S.W. was an ancilla middle-child sort, and not fully ripe—but she was descended from an old-generation tyrant. Snapping her bones was a minor victory. Splitting her carotid yielded the eight-pint prize of having victory in your cells.

 _Diablerie_ is a fantasy of everyone weak. Do more than kill your betters: become them.

Morality's a little meaningless if you're the one being absorbed. And her she was—a strapped-down blood thermos with a smack like fillet mignon.

Ms. Woeburne felt the sloppy razor burn of teeth in her collarbone.

She didn't panic. She did the worst thing a corporal can do, for a moment.

She stopped.

It hurt. Not badly, but it did. A palm heel was pressing her jaw aside, leaving bright pink finger marks, pushing her left temple against the ground. Screws in the arc of her back. She must've noised something. There was a thunderous echo when her chair screeched a few feet across the concrete. Metal pealed. Teeth clacked loudly within her head. Frighteningly loud, like a gunshot held between her lips.

Then everything started ringing and it became very hard to move at all.

_What do you want me to tell you?_

_Natural selection?_

Ms. Woeburne struggled in silence for the first few moments. Her chin swiveled, grimace fierce and hateful; loose strands of hair whipped, turn-over-turn of useless turns. That clammy mitt kept grabbing for and smashing it. She felt more like a child trying to spit out her medicine than someone being killed. It did not feel like incisors in her skin. It felt like great absence of self. She could not use her arms or feet or elbows. She did not know why she did not scream again.

It was a sound that stopped everything short.

It was the sound of something ripping, to be exact. It squealed all that sterling Camarilla indignation to a halt. A maraca of terror rattled up through the horribleness. And you can't do that. You can't.

These are the rules of which you'd be reminding yourself, if you were her, if you framed everything in negatives, in cannots, could-nevers, impossibles. Instinct—a dizziness, a churn that crossed her eyes behind their lids. Her head was pounding in doughy, vicious bolts. There would be no traces. His mouth smelled stale, like liquor and indolence; his free hand was digging rudely into the pliable stomach near her liver. No one could allow this.

What was that ripping noise? Where was the sound?

In terror is traitorous compulsion to submit. You are not a prey animal, a Ventrue swears to herself throughout her life. You are not a zebra with teeth in its withers. What made that noise?

Ms. Woeburne was disallowing, and trying hard, and about cry out—her torso squirming in a desperate effort to pitch a shoulder into the boy's bottom jaw—when she noticed something miraculous.

In the hazy muddle of it all, her right arm had burst free.

The sound? It was tape.

Don't pause.

Don't vacillate.

Whatever a soldier does, she doesn't waffle if she intends to live.

S.W. flicked out her thumb and gouged it all the way into his closest eye.

He was not expecting _that—_ bottom-feeder son-of-a-bitch—and he retracted, a regurgitating python, fangs wet with cooling blood. There a cold rush of strength beneath the lethargy of being fed upon. Three greedy swigs. That's what the Brujah won himself; it was enough to make S.W woozy, to damage her, but not to incapacitate a Foreman. Ms. Woeburne is a stout Party trooper. She does not dally and she does not slow it down.

The boy was bleating. It was the most pathetic noise she had ever heard—a sob-shaken wail of being stuck. The Ventrue twisted gracelessly out of the chair, clambering to tender shins and then upon her naked feet. _Purple toenails_. There were bruises making everything sore but she did not let them. His shut eye had made a vomitous pop inside its socket and lost a mix of salt, mucous and thin redness. God, she had pushed it right out, crushed deep into the sclera. The lightweight anchor of seat was still tethered to S.W.'s left wrist. She struggled to detach it while her enemy, yowling, banged himself into the bricks, but she could not do so; there was not enough time. There never is.

Legs clanged gawkily in the blank space between them. It seemed very wide, bizarrely claustrophobic. She grabbed for her torn neck. Blood sluiced over blouse buttons. He bellowed something at her, strings dangling, a gelatin mess, head whirling; oh my god, how profane a thing to see, how awful; she stood stock still and did not even think to hiss. She thought: _Do not look at the face. Do not._ Her bottom teeth were shapely and bare through the slackness of jowl. Her fingers were slick and rank. His had splayed on the wall the same way a spider's forelegs do when it prepares to pounce. _Do not look at the holes you have made._

The corporal watched his feet instead. When they lunged—dogs do that; they _lunge_ —she strafed towards the blind eye, and swung her makeshift bludgeon. The steel clubbed his skull plates in with echoing, metallic _'thwack!_ ' They both shuddered away from the impact. His blood—not hers—was droplets on the floor.

S.W. could not spare the energy to be revolted. She pawed again at herself, fumbling for the untidy puncture wounds. They were ragged, but Fortitude made them smaller. It would have been a waste to spill, she guessed. _'A waste,'_ she'd thought, how many times? Herself dead is _'a loss of resources.'_ Wouldn't want your blueblood shotglass to lose her precious self all over the ground.

Lifting the folding chair over her breast like a riot shield, she surged forward, flattening its back beam against her enemy's face. Both the man's hands threw up a barricade. _Stop?_ —no, she won't. His calves buckled, brain still swimming from the last drive. They were both sprawled across the floor; S.W. hefted every ounce of her weight down, sandwiching him between tile and cheap metal. They'd fallen right on that centerpiece drain. Her knees fumbled for leverage. Her toes bent in an effort to find some unslippery ground.

Don't flag.

Don't let up.

Wouldn't want to disappoint the Raj, sapper. Wouldn't want to stumble and snap your pretty nose.

One Brujah fist grappled for her forearm—but before it could find strength to upend them, Ms. Woeburne bowed forward and pulled out his jugular with her mouth.

A sound like a cough and a burble and the spit of a run-over cat.

It was foul. It was all foul—the remnants of eye; the young essence, steaming poorly; a mouthful of sodium. The Foreman forewent tasting at all and just bit, just shredded him. It was an unconscious thing. She crunched down until every tooth touched through the skin and she shook her head like a bull terrier.

One fierce twist, and the windpipe was laid open. Four and it hung in reeds, her face a warlike red patina. She squeezed her lashes tight to deflect anything that might spurt. By the time her facial muscles managed to relax, the neonate's esophagus was gaping open to tubular blues, mangled beyond repair.

It was the most vile—the most animal—thing that she had ever done, but God help Ms. Woeburne because a corporal would not feel it, should not guess, could not make herself care.

S.W. stood up, bare calves trembling beneath their drenched skirt, watching the man who tried to murderer her die. His one eye bulged and thawed to glossy milk. His vertebrae stuck up through the trachea mess.

Don't cave.

Don't crumble.

Don't lose your step in the jungle, soldier.

These are the rules of being a regime. This is how you belong to conquerors, where rusty links are not tolerated, and only feeble boots limp.

Shock chased reality off. Suddenly the Ventrue was certain she'd be sick, but instead, terrifying blankness: she pulled the key ring from his jeans pocket. She used its teeth to remove any remaining tape. And that done, she turned it slowly in the oversized lock, and she stepped out into free air, still dripping from her jaw.

Don't put your rifle down now.

Ms. Woeburne emerged in a nondescript alley. There were no familiar street signs. There was no sky through the crowded tenement ribs and dimmed streetlamps. There was a night wind and an unseasonal chill. She was alone, save for a stray Siamese that took one sniff in her direction and skittered off into someone's trash bin.

It was ten past five. Forty minutes to dawn, if she was lucky.

She wiped her face in both hands and shut the door behind her.

And the Ventrue fled, barefoot, the soles of her feet and the color on her toenails undaunted by broken glass.


	22. Second Sheriff

Three o'clock in the morning, nothing is open in LA save the liquor and the sex and the places you can buy buckshot.

"I see you've come up since the last time I been in here," Nines observed, tossing a magazine back onto the counter, and they talked.

"Could say that, yeah. I got a killer deal from my people downstate. Not exactly legal, but what the hell is these days? More where that came from." The graying ammunitions dealer flicked a nod towards his storage room. Opaque eyes, brightened up with an imp kind of friendliness, crinkled happily at the two vampires rifling around.

It must've been a slow week in here for old Gabriel Milam, judging from the way his wrinkles and whiskers were all grins. A Nosferatu's ghoul, Gabe had just enough sense to hide himself and just enough guts not to get particular preoccupied over who he sold to. Didn't accept clients off the street—Clan referral only, negotiations closed. Wouldn't talk to you, otherwise. Would hardly talk to you, anyway. He probably suspected they were Anarchs. But if that was true, he also didn't seem to care.

 _"I ask no questions, you tell me no tales,"_ was Gabe's personal policy—said so the first time Nines came in here, a letter of recommendation in his pocket from some Hollywood kid who was dead now. He'd plug up his ears or chuck you out if you talked politics at him. He kept an aerosol can and a lighter beneath the front desk. There was even a black tarp tented over the signless street door; made this place look funereal as hell; hid everybody inside. He was as good as an independent could be.

Now, usually an independent will sell you right out—that's no secret. And it's no secret Anarchs can't have mile-long receipts and bank statements building up under accounts named FIREARMS; any Prince would love to roast a rebel on his paper trail, so arming a militia's a bit of a feat. But Milam was a different stroke. He had a little of that old-fashioned scout's honor, too.

Which the Baron was grateful for—because, as you'd imagine, it's hard to buy a truckload of chemicals and semi-automatics when your name is Rodriguez these nights.

"Tell you what," was Gabe proposed; he watched them more closely than his sharp chin and bushy brows let on. Blunt teeth glinted under the sheeted overhead. He had one brown eye that stayed narrow; cataracts turned the other an unearthly, gluespill blue. And he had just enough ponytail to look like an asshole who might kill somebody. "Since I landed a special rate and you've been a loyal customer, you put in a long-term order with me tonight, I'll knock fifteen percent off the whole bundle."

"Throw in that Twelve you tried to sell me last month and we got a deal."

Milam rummaged for his a ring, plucked the rusty piece, and headed unlock the metal closet on his back wall. The Brujah went back to the catalog. He leant his elbows on the wood counter and flipped a couple pages. He remembered how many recruiters were casing San Fran. He thought about what probably wasn't listed here.

"Hey, Nines…" Kent-Alan was balancing a Weatherby rifle on one shoulder, posing his best action-hero. One knee bent, theatrical grimace. It was a showroom model. He looked about eighteen years old. "Whaddya say? You think I'd attract too much attention slinging Ole Boy around?"

"Kick will blow your arms off."

"But you've got to admit I look epic," K-Al shot back gleefully, swinging it around in a wide Rambo arc. Rodriguez shoved the nozzle out of his face with a blithe expression of annoyance.

"Then blow your arms off. What do I care? I'm looking at something," he grumbled. The Toreador took a few imaginary headshots at a few imaginary Kuei-jin dancing across the street.

Gabe'd never met small-fry until tonight, and K-Al was giddy as a clam around all this fancy scoped ordinance. But Nines was a longstanding client of his. He skulked in every couple months with an easy smile and a fistful of cash, fronting no explanation, filling his flatbed with whatever explosives there were to be had.

"Lucky you came in tonight." Milam used his foot to slide over a short ladder. It cracked open, and he climbed to the very top. One long, gamey arm reached high for the hanging shotgun. Nines scratched a name into the paper register; it was not _Rodriguez_. "Not to get mercenary on you, son, but I've been getting a ton of requests for those lately," he told Playboy, who was still playing with that goddamn gun. "Everybody thinks they're a big game hunter. I say to myself: Gabe, you've got to be supplying half the gangs in LA. Next thing it'll be the police knocking—LAPD people trying to buy up my goods, beat-down that nasty business going on in Chinatown. Tong busts and whatnot. Me, I keep out of that mess; hope you can do the same."

"How hard would it be to get me some more astrolite?" the Baron asked him, only half out-of-the-blue.

"Fan of fireworks, are we? I've got another can in the basement. Give me a minute; I'll grab it for you."

"How hard would it be to get me a _lot_ of astrolite?"

Gabe looked back and climbed down with a rifle and a shotgun in his hands.

"Construction project, eh?" Good business, healthy smile, a side of teasing. He didn't want to know anything more.

Nines said: "Something like that."

"Well. I've got a local contact for specials. Sells out of Santa Monica, but he's an East Coast boy, kind of a prick. He'll set it up, but it'll take me some time. Hardest thing about liquids is figuring how to move more than a can at once; that juice is mean, it's finicky, and I don't want a disaster zone in the middle of the freeway. I'll have to break it up, get it in loads. But it'll happen. Give me three, four weeks and I'll see what I can do for you, my friend."

"Appreciate it," he said, and seemed genuine, though Gabe had no reason to think he was.

"What the hell. I'm going in." K-Al stepped up and placed his model on the counter to exchange. Kid's smile was full of wicked childishness beneath the fronds of off-gold. Nines straightened up, looked away from that mess of machine on the table; he was irritable, and he wanted to roll his eyes. "Only live once, right? Kind of."

"Buy what you need. We better get on," Rodriguez told him. The wall clock said 3:15. Everything smelled a little like vodka in here. There was nothing to cover the cheap hardwood floors or brownstone walls, musty with insulation, and the traffic sounds outside were making him anxious. He reached into his pocket for the wallet. "Sun'll be up before too long, and we got a situation to square away."

The kid understood his meaning and Kent-Alan's face was at once in a gruesome mood.

Tonight, Nines had a gun at his hip and a bullet in the gun for a Ventrue brain; and he wanted to be subtle; but sometimes, with snakes, it is slaughter, and others, it's just a thing you have to do.

Killing Camarilla Childer is dangerous business. Woeburne somewhat more than usual. Push came to shove, still your standard Scepter: old Chicago Boy zeal and selective memory, self-serving doctrines and smart fucking mouth. Do-no-wrong mentality and barbershop fees in the hundreds; suit authority and unworn shoes; had a nation at their feet and kept high-stepping. Shit, Nines hated talking to these Ventrue.

Honestly, he'd rather somebody else carry this bullet. The very last thing they need downtown is another heap of political fallout on their doorstep.

 _Wolf-Prince_. It was a stupid insult. It bothered him.

"All right, then," Milam chirped, vaguely a Queenslander. He returned with two neatly-taped care packages of ammunition, a wrapped pump-action, a case for the rifle and a printed receipt. "Here's what you wanted for the road, and I'll call when the rest is ready to ship. Will do on the astro. Thanks for your business, gents."

Nines paid for everything, pushed it all at Kent-Alan, and headed back to the truck. Skelter procured it two nights ago. Red-on-black, flashy as fuck, but it had a flatbed with enough room to make these trips worthwhile. Give it a month, anyway. Give it a while. Somebody would blow it up or leave it in the field or break the engine down.

Short drive tonight, at least.

It was a bit shorter than Rodriguez's fuse—which had sparked this afternoon when a car backfired outside his apartment, big bull of noise that jumped him out of bed, sent him scrambling, flipped his mattress, like to be double-barreled down. It kept simmering while Damsel filled him in on the CDC operation, Nines sort-of-listening, a plastic glass full of breakfast warming in his hand. And it burned fast when K-Al started fiddling with the dials a few minutes ago, tapping his shoe, cranking window levers. Bullets of various calibers rattled in the backseat, another card on the Griffith Park stack. Potholes everywhere in this fucking town. LA was a jumble of annoyances tonight, and Nines, in-contention as he was, couldn't afford to kick this jolly little kid to the curb.

They parked on the side of a deserted city road. The California palms were fidgeting fingers and the moonbelly yellowed the redbrick scowling in on either side.

"Come on, then," Nines said. "I'd rather make this quick."

"Wanna race?"

"I'm serious. I ain't got armor on, and I don't want some Venture SWAT party shooting me in the ass. Is that getting through?"

"Loud and clear." Kent-Alan pulled his pistol for good measure, shot a jackass wink and a deputy cluck. "All forces now protecting your ass, boss."

Stupid kid. He was all right.

The alley they stepped into was familiar: inconspicuous slum, cramped apartments; tight, murky corners; slack garbage collection. Arsonist burnt-out half these tenements six, seven years ago—left a street of new paint over charred wood, lots of homes devolved into cheap rental storage for who the fuck knows. Their lonely basement wasn't even the only one. Some of these windows had never been fixed. Breathe deep, still smelled like a goddamn fire. The walk was two blocks only, but with all this shadow overhang, the lingering scent of ash, it was unnerving enough.

They went quickly. Kent-Alan lagged several yards for a better peripheral, eye sharper than his attitude let on. No thru-traffic. No one took a shot. One rat, one sickly cat, and that was all. And there was the unmarked locker door, nicked thrice to indicate a body attachment for other Anarchs in-the-loop. It looked exactly as it had when he'd left it last. Rodriguez reached for his key as K-Al rapped knuckles-to-metal, an arrogant little knock. The latch turned audibly. The prison opened dark.

 _"Surprised"_ didn't quite cut it.

Kent-Alan coughed on his scream.

"Holy shit. Oh God! Oh my god. Jesus! How—" And the kid stopped so short that the Baron bumped into him. Anarch footsoldier of five years lay in a sidewinder-'S' of blood, drying into tile glue, most of his insides still steaming in the winter humidity.

Nines stared. Kent-Alan stared. Sometimes there is nothing else you can do right away but look when a horrible thing's happened.

And this was a Class B Horrible, if it hadn't been a vampire—if it'd happened to some other thing. Disaster of kid sprayed across the floor, bits-and-pieces, blowing bubbles in the cruor of a lost cause. Guy's throat was in pork strips. The jugular, blue now like an Arkansas berry, dangled impotently through all the fire engine red. If there was a human face under there, it didn't count for much at this point; Young twitched limply in the centerpiece, soundless, no voicebox. It looked like somebody took a lawnmower blade to his front.

"Oh, fuck," Nines cussed, but by the time he moved to shove K-Al aside, the Toreador was out of his way.

Preacher, minus an eye.

 _How_ is the question, and sometimes the answer. Rodriguez wasn't sure if Kent-Alan said it or he thought it, but there was sure as shit no story coming out of their downed soldier; his tongue was all swollen inside that broken jaw. The wounded Brujah gaped fishlike around his residual aggression, anything he could manage to see. He was maybe a handbreadth from gone. There was a terrible meat smell in the windowless torture chamber. K-Al had never looked so scared in his entire life.

Beside them: there was a dented folding chair, with duct tape hanging off its arms.

"Fuck," Nines spat again, just to drive the point home.

Baron LA pawed for his gun and spun around to the exit. Outside—some of that stink followed him into cool air. He twisted his head both ways and all you could see of the Baron down this dank curb was the refraction of glass. There were no half-crazed Ventrue left hiding outside. There was no one to fire back.

 _Too late._ It made everything tingle a heartbeat dismay from the hollow of Rodriguez's chest to the nerves in his hands.

 _"Too late, honey,"_ _Chelle had said_ — _and then it was over, and Nines was bleeding to death on the floorboards, and he knew he was going to end._ _"You're a too-late bumpkin boy."_

He had to shake those words and that ghost voice off.

Kent-Alan didn't notice his Baron had darted outside. LA's secondhand deputy stood stock-still a few feet away from the spill of a Brujah. He was still like that when Nines came back—smacked-stupid, struck mute. Inane kid looked like he might scream for a moment, but lunged forward instead, fumbling to aid his comrade in the primary way.

"Oh, shit! Oh, _shit,_ " he was shouting as Rodriguez stepped back in, all that earlier humor cartwheeling away. Blood soaked his pant knees on the dirty linoleum. He scrambled for a sharp edge to split a forearm, forgetting about his teeth. Nothing came up. His palms couldn't make themselves untangle the mess of cords reeking there on this basement floor. "We're going to put you together," K-Al swore. "We're going to—"

Rodriguez stared at the flounder of carnage. He had ice all up and down his neck.

Young was not supposed to have a key.

The Baron seized and pulled Kent-Alan upright by the scruff of his ugly corduroy.

"Why are you here?" And Nines talks real nice when he wants you to volunteer. But when he demands something from you, that nice voice takes on a freeze, the sort of cold-unfeeling of Stalinists and peoples' regimes. K-Al caught the change. Big brown eyes moved, a stuck pea, between the Baron and the gurgling brother.

Young couldn't talk. His jowl wagged lamely, foam coming up. Kid needn't bother; Rodriguez could see a lie, right there, one-eyed, plain as an April day. He knew.

Nines took the gun from his right hip. When it hit—that bullet meant for a Ventrue head—it burst Young's skull in one go, done like a mud balloon.

Rochelle, when she killed him, said this: _"Sorry, angel, but you were just too fucking late."_

Kent-Alan gawped like a mouth hit by a Mack Truck. Maybe he screamed, but it was covered by the discharge and soon after there was nothing left to scream about. Only a few seconds left of Preacher; his parts tried realigning, failed; then cerebrum began fizzling up through bone cracks; and that was the last hurrah of a dead body dying again. Kid left little behind him but a few pieces of skeleton and a whole mess of blood.

The Toreador stared—just stared, just looked at the nothing-spot where a guy he knew had been.

Confusion smashed against a rubber wall of shock. Forget screaming; K-Al couldn't even find the sense to be mad.

"What the _fuck?!_ —Nines—What the hell did you do that for—?" He cried, or would have, if the panic hadn't tossed itself right over a cliff. Rodriguez silenced him by dropping his full hand. Playboy closed up. The Eagle went back into its holster.

"No _what-the-fuck_ here. I don't care who he was. You do not get leeway on diablerie for agreeing with me. Break our trust. Piece-of-shit," Nines scoffed, boot toeing a black pile of cinder. He'd almost said "break my orders."

"He got it. He got thrashed. But fuck, man, you just—just—"

Trust is what it is, but that didn't mean nobody ever got distraught about it. K-Al was gasping for air he didn't need. There was a wild glaze over pupils; fear emotion, a precipice of tears.

Rodriguez gave him a hard look. "Damn right I did. Pull something like what happened here—some slimy Sabbat shit—you don't get to count on my friendship, or yours. Only help a beast gets from us is getting put down. I'd expect you to make the same call."

Kent-Alan just glazed over by this point. He watched, blankly, as the last fragments cooled—and then he turned, moon-faced, knowing nothing but to follow the Baron out.

Try to fight the Ventrue. Try to smoke them out of their scales. There is no monster more terrible than absolute egotism, than perfect selfishness, than the machine wheel of greed. Try to hurt it. You will have to become a terrible thing.

Silence when the humidity of downtown descended. Neither Anarch looked at the other. K-Al's footfalls were grueling on the asphalt. Kid stuffed his hands in his empty pockets, needing somewhere safe to put them. Possible he'd started crying and had to swallow it back down, trying to stem the horror and save pride—because besides pride and his glossy new Weatherby, what does a reject Toreador have?

Horror, probably.

Nines ran right through it. He stalked too fast to be caught up to right away. A Baron has bigger business, more pressing concerns than dead gunners on the floor.

"And what are we going to do about her?" Kent-Alan finally asked, grasping something real to fill the hole disbelief just punched in. His legs and shoulders were shaking. He leant wearily against the pickup when they found it again, dragging in deep lungfuls of damp air, watching Nines put the key in the lock.

The Baron's lips bent tightly along his front teeth. He'd buried enough Anarchs and killed enough kids not to care about the doesn't-matter ones anymore. You have to be harder than ten Sheriffs to be what they are. No respectable Sheriff would've told you different. No one can pardon a traitorous son-of-a-bitch.

And no one can pardon a snake who got free.

"What are you going to do about it?" he was asked. "What are you going to do?"

You can't go slow on this shit. He couldn't feel bad for Kent-Alan, sitting shotgun, ghost-white with hands hugging his brand new rifle like a child with a toy.

He had to call Isaac and talk.

Rodriguez grabbed one of those lanky Toreador arms, pulled it over, and took a glance at K-Al's watch.

"Outrun it," he said, slammed the door, and drove them both to Hollywood.


	23. False Steps

Ms. Woeburne brushed her teeth for thirty minutes straight.

They were a disaster. Six times she'd been over this sink now, growing less frantic but more irritable on each round. Everything was going wrong in there. Ulcers itched. Tape bits wedged stubbornly between little grooves. S.W.'s lips curled away from the phantom taste of Brujah blood, a smokiness under her gums; both the tops and bottoms were swollen, unsure if they wanted to morph purple or pale, but absolutely sure they were angry. Clapping her teeth open and shut had become a gruesome exercise in dry mouth. Every time, something clicked back there—until it hurt in her jowls—until the Ventrue felt like a nutcracker.

There was a frantic note to the way she poured and downed one more plastic cupful of Listerine.

"You sure you're all right?" E was standing in his carpetless living room, hands in his pajama pockets, staring at the vampire with guarded concern.

Ms. Woeburne nodded, still swishing her cheeks. They met an hour ago, when Lily—a flower who'd become much dearer in light of what she'd done—pulled up outside with Prince LaCroix's intermittently shaking representative in a ratty Nissan backseat. How the Caitiff had recognized S.W. in her current position was unclear. She'd looked like a ghastly creepy-crawlie that escaped the gutters. Which was a tier-top first impression, no doubt, but E had just offered her a washcloth and a shrug. He didn't say much of anything. He'd wore a quietly disturbed expression—endeavoring, beyond all else, to stay out of their way.

Ms. Woeburne had an inkling Eugene Walker did whatever it was his Sire asked of him. He'd welcomed the haggard vampire over their sink, into their home, without complaint. But then he'd hovered there, nervous, biting his thumbnails, waiting for something terrible to happen to them.

She'd barely made it up the apartment stairwell. Her left foot limped badly with no shoe to house it, and her fingers gouged blood into the narrow brick walls when she had stumbled. " _I'm fine,"_ the Ventrue insisted when Lily caught her arm and tried to help her. _"I'm fine, no need, I'm fine."_

Ms. Woeburne gargled, spat, and applied another generous glop of paste to her brush.

Coincidentally enough, Lily had been in a roundabout telephone conversation with Officer Krantz when the call came. She'd leapt out of her chair when S.W.'s voice scratched through. Then she hung up on both, taking her apartment steps at a jog, adrenaline racing. They rendezvoused at a shitty west side payphone. They vampire had been drowning in a musty faux-mink coat that looked salvaged from a trash can, knees bare, a ratty sweatshirt hood draped over her obviously battered face. Two black eyes yellowed either side of a broken nose; her bottom lip had split four, five times. Grime hardened the dark brown hair. Lily thought of war movies as the reserved, straight-laced Ventrue hoarsely explained she had nowhere safe to go, certainly not home, and can she please come with her because it would be only for one night?

The resolution was clear, S.W. supposed, as she rinsed and scoured and spat again.

Ms. Woeburne was not sure why asking Lily Harris for help had seemed like a good idea. But she'd done it—maybe because Caitiff impotence generally put them beyond political betrayals, and maybe because there hadn't been many other people. She did not really know anyone in Los Angeles. Not anyone at all.

S.W. pulled the bristles out. They were pink from where she'd scrubbed into canker. Another eddy of mouthwash, though, and her teeth were fresh, the porcelain bathed in medicine green _._ Hygiene would never be so satisfying again, Ms. Woeburne observed, ignoring the sting and shoving her brush back in.

Lily and E shared a cramped one-bedroom far east of downtown. It was a place for lonesome, malnourished twentysomes: one spacey, whitewashed studio with a shampoo-choked bathroom and a malfunctioning kitchen. They lived beneath an airport flight path and nowhere near S.W.'s part of town. But the rent was low, the floor was furnished, and the noise was a constant reminder of life beyond. It smelled like Chinese fried egg and _Ocean Mist_ aerosol. The eggs were a result of E's penchant for Asian takeout, and the cheap air-freshener its aftermath. This hazy mix of chemical and food gave Ms. Woeburne a sinus headache, but she had bigger problems at present than the atmosphere, and more than a pinch in the middle of her brow.

She told them thank-you in the way familiar to her: _"I will repay you for this. I will pay you back."_

Civility is an important part of Ventrue survival—but manners were the least of her worries tonight, and it showed. Alas, the first thing S.W. did one step into their house hadn't been exchanging introductions. Instead, she'd skipped the welcome mat, stalked straight past E where he skittered up on his couch, lunged for the bathroom sink, and thrust her head under its spigot until red water ran clear. Hair melted down her cheekbones, languid, dripping limp like a sigh. Tear smudges disappeared. Crusted blood released skin and showed the chalkiness beneath.

She'd tossed the flea-bitten coat in a garbage bin—stupid floof of thing—disposed of her soaked clothes, showered once, and was now outfitted in a set of Lily's. They fit badly. Blue sweats sagged around her upper shins for want of more height, but the thighs were too snug; a stretched, fading t-shirt sporting an awfully unclever bunny rabbit did not exactly suit Ms. Woeburne. But the Ventrue bore her washing-machined spring cleaning rags without objection. She borrowed two ace bandages to wrap her gruesome digits in, packing everything tightly, knuckles-to-wrist.

She looked terrible. She looked like a runaway who'd fallen through a manhole, who'd called for police and got something else.

"I think I would like to lie down," Ms. Woeburne said, finally, firing one last precision spit bullet into the basin, flinging a pink wash towel around her neck.

What was she going to do?

Contact the Prince. This is what you try very hard to never have to do, if you are a bailiff like her—someone he would rather not bother him, someone he entrusts will get it done. This all was a mite different than tax returns and peeping Harpies. She'd have to dial Venture sooner or later to have a conversation Woeburne had been dreading since Nines Rodriguez knocked her over in that chair. A strange fear in the wake of visceral fists. Confessing it _felt_ like something—it felt tenfold harder, made everything real. How could it not have been real? Bitterly real with rings in her jaw; wickedly, wretchedly real with cuspids at her clavicle and a roach on the wall. It seemed so impossible those things had happened to her.

She didn't anticipate Mr. LaCroix would be angry with her—no, no, not exactly. Anger, no.

But she did not want him to see her like this.

There are some people to whom you do not show wounds. There are some men you do not allow to see you low. There are some people in the world, do you know—people for whom sympathy is more difficult than pain. There are women like S. Woeburne, to whom too much kindness tastes like disgrace.

That may or may not have been why the toothbrushing routine was taking an inordinate amount of time.

"We've got a futon you can sleep on." Lily chewed her lip. She'd been swallowed to the knees by a shirt that read HANALEI BAY and must've belonged to E. They looked like a pathetic matched-set standing there behind S.W. Bleeding between her incisors with a mouthful of suds, she did not seem much better off. "The couch. Used to fold out, but something broke back there a while back. It's kind of crappy, to be honest. There's not a lot of privacy. Sorry."

"That's all right; I won't doing much sleeping, anyway," Woeburne fobbed off, patting her face with the edge of the towel, gingerly leaving the washroom. She'd probably spend the morning scalding some more of her skin off under the showerhead. With socks on her feet, the good corporal was beginning to feel more like an individual again. The flesh surrounding her eyes was sunken and charcoaled, looking sick. "Do you mind if I use your computer?"

"Sure. The wifi's not great, but it should be OK for e-mail. Let me start it up for you. Oh! And before I forget…" Lily nudged her laptop aside, reaching into the desk drawer and handing over Ms. Woeburne's phone. Who smiled. But her stomach dropped. "I didn't know when you'd be back, so I just took it. Hope you don't mind."

S.W. waved whatever else the girl said off and sat to check. Four missed calls from an agency number; the one message was UPS informing her two undelivered packages awaited retrieval at a nearby post office.

Ms. Woeburne closed her cell and set it down beside the keyboard. There was an ache building again, a mulish twang beneath the sheets of muscle, gristle, fat. Her hands hurt. Perhaps, then, you will find no shame in it if the Ventrue admits she did not want to do business tonight. She didn't want to work, not even twenty-four hours free, but the question demanded to be asked: Had anyone else noticed she'd disappeared?

A harrowing thought. A martyrish, wanton, _did-they-even_ thought. S.W. thumbed through her inbox for fifteen bland minutes, mind number than any part of her body, deleting junk and mulling hard on each click. There was nothing urgent. Questions from Roderick; a note from Mr. LaCroix asking her to make an appointment. To _check in_.

If the Prince was still waiting for a response on that one, he was likely getting annoyed with her.

She didn't have enough energy to wonder about it. Ms. Woeburne crept sluggishly to the couch Lily indicated, plopping her rear end into pillowcases stamped with sea creatures. Green turtles rumpled into colorful octopi. The mauve futon gave a sad little creak beneath its occupant's weight.

" _Hold please, thank you, just a minute,"_ Joelle said. S.W. told the Toreador nothing. There was a strange, inhuman voice in her throat that tasted fretfully cold for someone who'd screamed murder just hours ago. Hours, days? Who could say? It was difficult to let herself care about time discrepancies right now; she swallowed again, clearing a lump, and listened. It took five minutes. _"Hello? Yes, dearest. Mr. LaCroix cannot answer your call right now, but he absolutely insists that you come to see him first thing tomorrow night. How is eight o'clock for you? He was very specific, so of course, my friend, you won't be late. We won't keep the Prince waiting. Will we? Of course not. Good night, dear girl!"_

Ms. Woeburne had a clear picture of Lefevre's gouging, conspiratorial wink in that last second before the miffed Ventrue hung up. How many English-to-French translations were there for "raunchy bitch," she wondered?

Well, so there it was. If Mr. LaCroix hadn't already been made privy to this violence, he would know soon.

By the time her telephone calls and political plans were closed for the night, Lily and E had retreated into their modest kitchen together, allowing Ms. Woeburne whatever space they could. S.W. heard them conversing in low voices, could sense the fledglings' disquiet at harboring a vampire who'd been drenched through with blood. Their concern was understandable. Involving them had been selfish, but bites at her neck brought said blood-drenched vampire to a point where selfishness seemed like the safest exit from everything else.

There was certainly nothing she could do about it now. Not from a shabby, congested studio leased to her flimsy housekeeper. And not with elastic holding together the broken bones.

S.W. switched from ring to vibrate, lay rigidly across their uncomfortable couch, and tried not to think about it—tried to keep the acids from eating her up. But every time her eyes closed there might have been a basement door, and every time they opened, she was staring at the ceiling of a small black room.

* * *

****II.** **

**TO: LOS ANGELES BOARD**  
**FROM: THE OFFICES OF THE PRINCE**  
**DATE: MARCH 11 2010 2:37 AM**  
**SUBJECT: RETRACTION**

Dear Esteemed Board Members,

 

Please disregard the prior message you received re: emergency personnel updates in your department. This notice was preemptory and no longer describes the ongoing situation.

Agent has been reacquired.

We regret the confusion. You are encouraged to direct any and all questions pertaining to this matter to the Offices of the Prince.

Warm Regards,

 

JOELLE LEFEVRE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES

* * *

**III.**

When she stepped into Prince LaCroix's penthouse the next night, Ms. Woeburne could not keep her hands from shaking.

The officer expected one of two scenarios: _1\. There was already a complex prosecution underway that would require her only in the most peripheral sense_ , or _2\. She would have to explain._ Neither option was exactly attractive. Exhausted but unable to rest, Ms. Woeburne spent morning curled into that hideous futon couch, mowing all her broken nails to impotent, harmless stubs. She would make it swift and professional, the Ventrue thought, lying there in the fanblade dark. She could do professional. She was somewhat less comfortable with swift, but you know, sometimes you just have to stagger on through.

Picture her surprise to enter that office at eight o'clock and stare down half the city's Primogen.

Ms. Woeburne hadn't formally met the politicians spread out before her; it would have been inappropriate for a modestly-ranking operative, and a waste of Mr. LaCroix's time. But she recognized them immediately. They were big names with deadly looks S.W. memorized from the very first set of dossiers Los Angeles sent her way. She could not afford to misremember them. A Prince's representative—let alone a Prince's Childe—cannot risk rubbing the wrong elbow, nor should she, expat or not, forget whose loyalties are written in blood and whose are bought.

There were four of them here, a rib of a council that had thinned in the last heave-ho of California Anarchy. First and most-easily spotted was Maximillian Strauss, the Tremere Regent, crimson stitching and Victorian blues. Beside him Alistair Grout fidgeted with his vest buttons, vermillion hair nesting wild and lionlike about an anemic face and crane hook of nose. Who'd overlook Claudia Fairholm?—Toreador speaker, social favorite; veiled hat and stippled sun dress; perfect and polished like a fairy who'd come alive one night straight from the bones of her infamous Hollywood mansion; like she, too, was made of Indonesian mahogany and crystal. And Claudia lounged arm-in-arm in a loveseat with Rozalin K. Greene, more a lion than Alistair if we measure the manes; hers was a medieval blonde against the plush red of the furniture, Gangrel ancestry only evidenced in the way that small woman tended to slouch. They petered about with various degrees of interest. They were anesthetizing and claustrophobic within the gilt heat of Camarilla headquarters.

They all looked at the open door.

S.W., hovering there in a discount suit she'd bought an hour ago, blanched the bitterest color of glue.

She backpedaled towards the elevator.

"Ms. Woeburne," the Prince said. Her name in the still air was terribly clear.

It caught her just beyond the exit, stare furiously green and embarrassingly wide. In that instant, Ms. Woeburne might've been a girl-child stuck with one hand in a cookie jar. She'd withdrawn from their circle like one might from a puff-adder, leaving it be, portentous and rattling through dry summer grass.

The sole ancilla in the room swallowed a throaty lump, tightened both fists, and took one step forward. "I apologize; please excuse me. I didn't mean to—"

But that was all. The shoulder pads in this three-button sports jacket she'd bought on the way in clung, and Ms. Woeburne could taste lipstick creasing over her mouth. It was two shades too bright a red. The hairspray she'd laden on was ungodly, an effort to plume; caked matte did its best to mask bruises. S.W. felt like a sixteen-year-old playing grown-up for her first interview. She still had the ace bandages on. They were rubbing away beneath cufflinks made probably from cheap steel.

"Interrupt," Ms. Woeburne finished, as though it was something up for debate.

Strauss took little notice. Grout, losing the war with his buttons, nodding in a pardoning way. Rozalin nudged Claudia, who squinted and grinned like beautiful lashes on a sickly sweet song.

"Friends." Mr. LaCroix shot a look that tried to be affable and was anything but. His face had borrowed a Nordic glow from the nearby fireplace; he was unhappy about his American and European spheres meeting, but you couldn't tell if it was the former or latter who'd stepped harder on their Prince's toes. "I seem to be overbooked. This is very important to me. But since we've run an hour overtime—and, I'm sure you've noticed, there are appointments lining up at the door—we will have to adjourn. Let's continue this next week. My receptionist will schedule a date and send it. That does not overmuch inconvenience you, I trust."

He trusts? It's not as though they might complain—especially not the Malkavian Primogen, who stood in this gold-paper chamber with a frown troubling him deeper than anyone else's. Fairholm pounced to her feet with that same demeaning smile tough Toreador always wear, taking Greene with her. (They two were partners in crime of the oldest variety, the sort of bad-energy duo that pokes fun at Princes and rolls their eyes, to whom meetings are chores that must be done.) Even Strauss, who took no guff from LaCroix, appeared content turn his coattails and leave. They said no goodbyes. In that moment, S.W. felt fierce admiration for her Sire—who dealt with these people and worse every day, and who, if he chose, could send them away.

So she watched his small cabinet depart, hugging a wall to clear the thoroughfare. They paid her no mind. And why pay anything when you do not have to?: she was an unpresented descendant, a society-nothing. Grout's tendrils wafted. She could smell a curl of the Toreador's chamomile and wine.

"Am I too early?" Ms. Woeburne asked, straightening her back like a good soldier. "If I am. I can come back. I'll go, and."

If you can't hide your disaster, the least you can do is pretend. When you wear a badge, people will expect this from you—and if you can hold on the tin plate long enough, your body absorbs it. You grow a metal casket like a brand new gun.

Hers foundered, a little, when he stood up and held out an arm for her. She sensed the platemail shift and felt a crack run up the side. You oughtn't levy surprise maneuvers on a friendly combatant like that; it isn't honorable. Ms. Woeburne needed this part of herself very badly and he should have known that and she wasn't sure she could forgive him.

"Ms. Woeburne, I am so sorry for you," he said, in that moment contrite as a pastor, as someone who could be brought around to care. She felt her stomach lurch, the stones running to thin sand. Sympathy—worse than a lecture, than any stern talking-to. S.W. tried to shrug but could not bear it. There were riggings in her mouth, her nostrils and neck that began to hurt nonsensically; suddenly there was a strange, compromising, everywhere sting. The good soldier put her hands over her face to keep it in but somehow they became quite wet.

And then it happened the shoulder she tried to shrug started shaking, and in her best effort to hold it down, that began to burn very badly, too. Teeth bit down on tongue. ' _Oh, no,'_ S.W. thought, _'_ _Please don't._ ' But there was already dampness and darkness behind the wall of her palms. She had wanted professional, swift, business; had expected debriefing, instructions, criticism. Ms. Woeburne did not know what to do with compassion. It went down like powdered glass.

One set of steps on the marble and—though she wasn't certain of the mechanics—the Childe slumped forward to grab the offered hand, just to hold herself up, and then the other was on her shoulder, and she dropped her head onto a black lapel.

It was disaster. S.W. could not remember having cried so much in her life.

She wept for a short time, an out-of-character flimsiness that the Prince allowed her—which was, it perhaps by now goes without saying, equally out-of-character. Maybe this was the compassion, if the apology had not been. Ms. Woeburne did not really care how authentic it was; she kept her nose flat against her little fingers, a sad excuse for a diplomat, cheeks burning. Her hand bandages soaked up the grief and ruined her mascara. It was not about authenticity, you know. She was afraid.

She was afraid, too, to right herself and be subject to the scrutiny. Their height was too similar to avoid it; his chin pressed over her skull beneath an expression S.W. had no desire to see ever in her life. She was wooden. And she was going to have to come out to face him eventually; you can't cry forever, can you; but until that eventually, crying was the best of all options, the one that hurt the least.

Yes, it's a half-thing. It's a lesser bridge built on finest options, calculated concern, and rationed kindness. Theirs is an incomplete parentage, an attachment standing on sticks. But it was all Ms. Woeburne had on her side.

"There, there. No need. You're all right," the Prince told her crisply, which was the gentlest he could manage. _No need._ The worst is behind you; the terrors have already passed. She fought hard to stop it with the pain in her knuckles and the fist in her throat. "I will take care of everything now."

"I thought I was going to die," Ms. Woeburne said. The words sounded miserable and cool. There was a dismay to admitting it. Something like that shouldn't have to be a confession, but it was; it really was.

"This never should have happened to you. It is not your arena. It's inexcusable, and I am horrified. You will have agency protection from here on. Nothing like that will ever fall upon you again. I hope you can forgive us."

"They were going to kill me. They were—really—they were. I didn't say anything. I told the exactly what I was supposed to." She said it into a pocket.. S.W. was powerfully aware of the fact this reunion would have gone differently if her armor went as limp as it did now when she was sitting in that basement, being asked irrational things. She held her face a little away from the impersonal cologne and cold fabric, beneath the imperial chandelier. "They didn't care. They were going to hurl me into the sewer. They were really going to shoot me in the head."

"Well, the important thing is that you prevented them from doing so. Let's be done with it, then. You can put it in the past," he told her, something that sounded more like an order than an assurance to the woman with broken hands.

He patted her to stand her up, so she did, squeezing tight fists that hurt inside the knuckles.

"Stiff upper-lip, Ms. Woeburne," LaCroix told her, and that was case closed, that was all of it.

"I don't want protection." And it wasn't a protest, not really, but it was a question that ate at her guts. She looked through everything the way an animal does when it dies. "I want to appreciate where I am in this court. I want to know why I don't have diplomatic immunity in your Domain—that's what I want. I want to know—who put the words in my mouth?"

"I'm not sure what you mean," the Prince said, simply, blinking at S.W. as she stood there shivering beneath her skin, looking though nothing had ever upset him in his life. It was a terrible way to be talked to, and Ms. Woeburne's brow furrowed into something startled—something, perhaps, more like anger. Her face seemed defenseless and inappropriate.

"The report. My report. Who tampered with it?"

"Court documents are always subject to editing as they move through the upper channels. You know that better than anyone."

" _Editing_ ," she said. She hated to have to be here, like this, and watch him speak like a man unawares.

"You did fine work, of course. But we felt certain aspects of the case could have been made clearer. You, obviously, are intimately familiar with the reality that we cannot risk an administrative misunderstanding on account of—"

"I saw it. I saw the line."

"—one officer," he told her, and that, right here, was all. "I am sorry it happened to be you."

There was a dent in her nose as she said so, a stinging. Her tummy constricted. It made her voice seem odd, rubberlike, in a way it never ought to be.

"I understand," Ms. Woeburne, with that odd rubber voice, said. "I do. I don't resent it. But I want to—I want to do my job. If that's a non-issue in Los Angeles, then it is. I am fine with that. I want to do it well. But I want to know why I was told to keep management, why I was given offices, and then put in a position to—"

"You are in the same position you have always been," Prince LaCroix promised.

So she was.

Ms. Woeburne almost let herself finish before that something-like-anger dropped, lost all its quill. But it dropped, midway, too quickly to be reacted to. A something-else—something less like wrongness and more like reason—went cold. Is it reason, then, that does this? Is it good business, to stick a sharp tack in yourself this way? Something was bleaching out the animosity she'd stumbled into; it purged the nastiness her body had produced and held-in during those dark days underground. And it left her feeling bereft. There is no other word.

S.W. nodded, because it seemed like there was nothing else to do.

And when she saw her Sire again, he was looking at her with a small, manufactured expression. Though doing so re-broke a crease in the one officer's mouth, Ms. Woeburne forced herself to return it; she twisted out an up-skewed, rigid, grimacing smile.

"I'm glad you are feeling better," the Prince informed her.

S.W. blinked helplessly, not quite certain what had happened. Her arms hung awkwardly against her sides. One of them had felt like a fist, but no—it was flat now—it was open, ready, adaptable. "Yes," Ms. Woeburne agreed. "I'm all right now. I'm fine."

Because Ms. Woeburne delivers. She is always the soldier to say yes, and she was always fine.

"There you are. Now dry off, sit down, and we will get back to our business as it always should have been."

Feeling shell-shocked, S.W. yessed again, feebly, repositioning herself in a nearby chair as Mr. LaCroix returned to his desk. That barrier between them, rich and officious, brought some semblance of herself back. Ms. Woeburne supposed she was grateful. She watched numbly as the Prince removed a clean handkerchief from a middle drawer, shook it loose. She rubbed her cheeks with her palm heels while he brushed at a faint tearstain—a splotch on the lapel, a vaguely annoyed look—before he folded it, set it aside, and, finally, sat.

"I'm sorry—sorry about that. It just came over me. I don't know. But I'm all right. Thank you." They seemed to fall out of her mouth. Single-file, left-right-left. Lean forward and paste your fallen pieces of tin back on. She did not really know why she said thanks. "When I rang last night. Joelle mentioned you have something? For me."

"Did you receive my e-mail? Never mind. I may as well just tell you," the Prince supposed, folding hands more elegant than hers over the black furniture polish. Ms. Woeburne stared at him, blindsided by the question. They were talking about work. She struggled, lips thinning, giving her the cosmetic flavor of wax.

"I did see it," S.W. confirmed, choking twice into her hand to clear the phlegm. Soon it would sound normal, she thought; soon she would be recognizable to herself. "Though, of course, I didn't have time to look into the issue."

"Of course you didn't. But all the same, I think you'll be interested, so I'll hold it. For a better time, and for you." He scribbled something on his desk notepad. The spiral was always empty, always new. Someone must have replaced it every night. She had never seen him touch a handwritten page. "There's been some curious discourse in this city as of late. You've heard the apocalypse murmurings, I'm sure; they're hardly worth mentioning. But. Tell me, Ms. Woeburne: do you know anything about demonology?"

"Demonology." A technical word. There was a sense of nothingness still hanging. She'd been returned.

"Yes," the Prince told her. He looked like a raindrop on the lip of a palm frond; he looked an instant from being annoyed.

Ms. Woeburne made it dissipate. Ms. Woeburne was all right. "No. Should I? No, I can't say I do."

"That's too bad. It is occasionally useful to defuse the Noddists. I'll have some articles sent to you. But back to the matter at hand: It has come to my attention there is a Nagaraja independent taking refuge in Mercy Hospital. She was courteous enough to declare herself, and so, for the time being, I have agreed to tolerate her stay." He winced. "A wretched existence, but she is more of a curio than anything else. To express her gratitude for my hospitality, she made us an offer."

Two times the riches of Africa had made her Sire a wealthy man: first in the gold mines of Witwatersrand, then on the fire-sale of apartheid collapse. There's no reason for dead things to debate the morality of profiteering. Greed and colonialism were lifeblood long before they were Kindred. That is the nature of free-market exchange.

_Going to do a little capitalism._

The Ventrue's spine jerked against her chair when she realized Mr. LaCroix had stopped speaking. His lips were pursed; there was a sharp, slight insult to the slant of his brow. "Beg pardon, Ms. Woeburne. Am I boring you?"

"No. No, not at all," she swore.

Is it over? Is this something visceral that can be put just-like-that in the past?

"I'm sorry if I still seem distracted. It's passing. I can take care of it. Is this something you would like me to delegate or attend to personally?"

"I think you can answer that question yourself, Ms. Woeburne."

It felt normal. It felt normal, and that was surreal—as though a brief, unpublished chip of herself had just hit the incinerators _._ Had it happened? Had it happened, she asked—aware of the timeline, but not sure of the answer—at all? A rhetorical question, mostly. But there was that emptiness where outrage should've been, a whitenoise instead of black smoke, a crack on the dark wall of monster inside of her. She could see the abacus tallying itself back to zero. It was a political reset.

When losses cannot be addressed—when the last domino does not fall—when the murder is incomplete—they can sometimes be forgotten, put to sleep. Inconveniences, entanglements. Even the horrifying ones. This is the real laissez-faire.

"I'm sure, Mr. LaCroix," Ms. Woeburne heard herself promise. Her knuckles still felt like cranberry jelly. "Send me the details. I'll get on it tomorrow night."

"Of course you will. I knew you would. You are—and I think you know this—my first choice."

The smile they traded was laissez-faire, too.

Try to fight the Ventrue. You can not.

The phone rang.

Mr. LaCroix was rarely in a mood to receive calls. He picked up the telephone quickly; its pitch irritated him. "Yes," Prince LA demanded. She has never known him to answer _hello_. "What do you want?"

 _"I'll go,"_ Ms. Woeburne mouthed, standing halfway up, when his palm slap to the desk sat her right back down.

"I don't have time for—excuse me, _who_?" Her Sire's expression flat-ironed in a tight, furious way; a way she had not precisely seen before; a way his officer nevertheless recognized somehow. Stopped-up fury, the instant before outrage. She knew exactly who it was.

"You can't be serious," LaCroix snapped, a mean, skeptic _no_. Then: " _What_?" And finally: "Why? This is ridiculous; for what reason would I feel whatsoever inclined to allow you to—"

A brief, bristling pause as the Prince's resentment folded into something he could not articulate.

"Apparently," he chuffed. Mr. LaCroix thrust the receiver away from his ear and towards her. Ms. Woeburne jumped in the second seat she had tried to escape. "It's for _you_."

She spent a second staring. His scowl made S.W. pick up one flaccid arm and take that phone.

"Hello?" she tried, an awkward question-mark, an awfully meek greeting for a Good People Ventrue.

Her palm over the mouthpiece and her stern, disorderly look; LaCroix did not say anything. They were terrible in that moment together.

Compliance careened in. When you don't know what sort of ground you're standing on, it's best in the moment for a diplomat to speak short, simple statements; to think short, simple thoughts. She could feel the touching of hard teeth deep in her mouth. "Yes, this is Ms. Woeburne. Yes. That is correct. Yes, I— I see. Of course. Indeed. It is. Very serious. I understand. No, I can't comment. Correct. I believe so, but to be sure—" Stun a Scepter and get a brick wall. She showed no cognitive reaction whatsoever. She held the receiver firmly, fingers closed, eyes sidelong. "True enough. Yes. I'll tell him. Goodbye."

Ms. Woeburne hung up the telephone and handed it back to Mr. LaCroix with the deadened look of an outpatient. She went quiet. She had porcupine quills.

"And what," the Prince asked, curiosity bladelike, "did Mr. Abrams _say_?"

It's a bitterness in cold blooded-bodies. Her blank stare, bleakly olive, sharpened up and frowned down a splotch of wood-stain on Mr. LaCroix's desk. "Well. I can tell you what he said. I can't tell you what he meant. Presuming we can take him at his word—which is probably a large presumption. Abrams wants to meet with me. About what happened. It's an insult, I suppose." And the reality of that was lost to boardroom emptiness, an anesthesia of having something important to do. Woeburne sank imperceptibly into the seat. It reminded her very strongly in that moment of the one she'd used to bludgeon an Anarch's brainmatter out. "I suppose it's a threat."

The Prince was out from behind the desk and crossing his penthouse in a flurry before she could do, or take, anything else.

"—inadmissible. Completely absurd. Obvious farce," he snorted, fragments of language. One of the Ventrue's arms, with great momentum for his size, swung open a hidden wall closet from the stretch of papered gold-on-white. The coat he pulled out with unnecessary force. Prince LA wrestled it on, listless leather, falconer black. It made him look like an angry bit of Old World. S.W. blinked wildly, still glaring, her default. She did not want to speak to Isaac Abrams or a Baron of kind. She twisted 'round in her chair to watch and fret.

"Do I meet him, then?" Woeburne asked. She was not looked at. Mr. LaCroix buttoned up the snappers on his long-cut coat, looking outdated, like someone who would mount a horse and click his heels. "That's to say, do I make a response. I assume—I mean: I have to—that call was meant for you. But what else am I going to do?"

"You are going to leave whatever the Baron meant or didn't say to me. I've spent for this ceasefire, I've compromised, and I am not the only one. He has no right. He has no high ground to prop himself upon and shake red flags at me. I've seen what passes for society here," LaCroix snapped. His last, lowest buckle did, too—both in tandem. _Clip-clak!_ He started just below the neck and fastened down. "I know better. Call my office— _my_ office!—to stage some half-cocked Jyhad, and to do so with a clerk. Pah! Celebrate your idiocy if you must, but do not perform for me. Do not. Ms. Woeburne, gather your belongings. Don't dawdle."

The Ventrue skittered out of her chair at the flap of Mr. LaCroix's trench, wondering if she ought to say something calming. She had no belongings. She could see the ruffle that collar had made of the gold hair at Mr. LaCroix's nape and flattened her own in response.

He shoved a thumb into the intercom and barked. "Joelle, please buzz my driver. Do it now!"

It was a disaster. It was. But even now, in the debris of it—as she always did after Ms. Lefevre was shouted at—Ms. Woeburne enjoyed a small, sadistic cookie of pleasure.

At least it was something.

At least she was here.

Here, in this office. Here, still.

"We are going to Hollywood," LaCroix spat. They are not really large enough to thunder, you know—Ventrue and diplomats, consiglieri and capitalists. They do not have the bellies for it. But be that as it may, if you listen to the way a Prince cuts on his vowels, you will believe they boom. "You and I. We are going tonight. And we are going to settle all business with that Party. Let Abrams talk all he wishes—he will say it, if he can, to me."

Knowing when to speak and when to step aside, Ms. Woeburne followed—through the double-doors, down an elevator chute, and out into the winter black.


	24. Damage Control

Mr. LaCroix bitched all the way to Hollywood.

Current line: ridiculous.

"Ridiculous," the Prince spat, shoulders irritating the upholstery of his limousine backseat. It was the closest Ms. Woeburne ever seen him to a slouch. "Beyond ridiculous. I'm sure the Baron thinks himself wily. He must be wily, because nothing that Toreador has ever done in my tenure has been subtle, and this is anything but wise. He must imagine this is how you do diplomacy." The tip of a Scepter's tongue over his front teeth. He looked, when angry, like a furious boy with folded fists and licorice eyes. " _Pah_. Abrams must be having a laugh, drinking a glass—extending this so-called 'gesture' to you. Posturing, self-obsessed petit-maître. It has nothing to do with diplomacy. Tiny diplomacy. Idiot diplomacy."

Ms. Woeburne was neither tiny nor an idiot. But she listened anyway, ears perked for instructions embedded in the rumpus. The Prince's cheekbones caught lofty, brooding angles; he was hunched, fists clenched against his knees, like a slighted Little League athlete. He adjusted and readjusted. He squeezed his hands the rest of the way white.

S.W. didn't ask all the questions you or I might. She knows better than to prod; prodders don't live very long among the Ventrue. But Mr. LaCroix must've glimpsed some curiosities buried there, an inch beneath her skin. He must have seen her squirm. He said: "This has nothing to do with you. Of that, you can be certain."

"Not much has a lick to do with me. I've gathered. What I don't gather is why Abrams would stick his neck in your direction, especially when we've done—when I've done nothing against him," she shot. Talking about this was stirring her own pot again, a sub-surface temper, bubbles beneath steel plates. "This isn't his business. Whatever happened, whatever passed, it doesn't interest Hollywood. I haven't set a foot in that district. If anything—baiting me out here is a bigger threat to him than blotting my name and letting me be."

"Oh, please. Ms. Woeburne, please," he snorted. "They have no concept of longevity. They're a stumbling two-act—and they both know that if LA pulls them apart, I'll light them like haystacks." Mr. LaCroix was glaring at an unparticular square of glass somewhere behind his officer's sullen head. "The Anarch Party needs Abrams to lift a finger within these courts so long as Rodriguez refuses to. That can't be any surprise. If you won't negotiate with the Occupation, you cannot expect to be represented in their government. So the Anarchs rely on the same old moneyed blood they decry to protect them. Narcissists and hypocrites. Frauds and pretenders." Switchblade welling blood; someone's fists circling the back of her spine. _Try harder, Camarilla_.

"I saw how they operate," Ms. Woeburne scathed. Hr heels touched like a minuteman. She felt watery pain in her nose like a spur. "I saw their peacekeeping."

"I sympathize. Believe me: if anyone can commiserate about the Brujah and the Toreador, it's I." Neither laughed. Her English was imperfect, his was obsessively precise. "Pathetic pair of would-be dukes. One suspects Isaac will dispose of him when the Rabble breed beyond his control. One would have to suspect, assuming that selfsame mountebank respects his constituents as much as he respects his films. But no, not so. Jewery, hijinks. Hollywood has always been a Toreador estate. The Toreador molt and they whine. To compensate for their pitiful job of security—because they are afraid of what I might do in that outlandish district had I the mind—Abrams leans on the Brujah until they are pushed out, or until they are dead."

Here is how hard justice sits with Sebastian LaCroix: the Brujah can burn on a stake. The Toreador can preen in their dark halls like eunuchs and rot.

"Let them kill one another," Ms. Woeburne supposed. It was a cheap dismissal, but she felt as serious as any one of those lackadaisical Primogen who grinned when they should glare. "Why not? Let it devolve. The minute territories overlap, they'll be eating each other. That's how it goes," she said, and these were his words, his sentiments, translated through two hundred years and a corporal's tongue. "That's natural selection."

Their car took a sharp left turn, pushing her sleeve into a window. Condensation dampened S.W.'s suit jacket. The Ventrue's eyes, aloe with the car lighting and the overheads through glass, flicked for stray Kleenex; the Prince handed her a napkin with an imprudent thrust of his arm.

"It isn't bad advice, Ms. Woeburne. It is not silly to suppose so. But, for my purposes, it's not the most convenient path. What if they did turn, one upon the other? What if Rodriguez marched a brigade into Hollywood? Whichever way that pans out, we'll still be left with an inconvenience—one that can face us with new focus after its rival has been toppled. And tell me what you make of this: the Camarilla would still be petitioned to intervene." Mr. LaCroix crossly cleared his throat. S.W. folded her arms and stuffed the used tissue into her pocket.

"But the Brujah will lose, of course." She squeezed thin paper into a tiny, compact rock within her jacket, trying out her black-and-blue hand. "They lack artillery. They don't have a system. I told you—I told you about that boy I killed. Had to. If they can't keep their own—? In the long-run, they'll lose."

"Of course they will. Abrams won't let them steamroll far enough into his Domain to threaten him. He isn't quite that pompous. So perhaps you will see this my way. Hollywood's resistance has more to do with its Baron's checkbook than his idealism; when he loses his easy militia, he will come around. We can negotiate with financiers. Rodriguez, on the other hand, is useless to me. We are not interested in recruiting him, we will not forgive his record, and he is obviously aware. This is all about self-preservation, Ms. Woeburne. He'll cling to Isaac until he can't any longer, at which point, he will die. It is that simple. Sweep the Brujah aside, and Abrams will skulk back to that tacky pet theatre of his, that Orient joke, waiting for me to approach him or bribe him down. Dead or alive, Rodriguez won't factor at that point. If this deteriorates—which it will—perhaps I'll even convince Hollywood to sell him to me."

"A cheap deal. I'd swing the axe for you." She tapped at the tip of her nose. It burned. "Hypothetically speaking."

"Hypothetically speaking, Ms. Woeburne, I'd be tempted to make you an offer. You'd give a fair testimony. But it's moot. I'm not going to execute Nines Rodriguez," Sebastian told her, flicking his palm; it was all a preposterous, troublesome mess. It was a startlingly pale, arrogant palm. "Not a public execution, at any rate. There are one or two grains left in his hourglass. We'll see him dead, of course. But I'd rather not make that martyr myself." And all this time, the Prince had been furious. You could still see, looking closely, the wrench in his shoulder-blades, the pluck of hatred. But he had changed, gradually, as they spoke. He had leant back in his seat and loosened one arm, propped a stiff backbone against soft leather. In this discussion of convenience, and of opportune moments, a Ventrue fans out the cards he has to play, and feels better for it. He explained a few to her. He seemed relaxed. "Far better to manufacture a chance, or a coup, or a fight. But we'll not do it with ceremony—not unless I can justify it."

"I might be able to justify it."

A sticker, a gag. S.W. would not swing any axes, had no real counsel, and she'd no intentions of standing on a courtroom podium where good, honest corporals are likely to be shot.

He said: "I wish that were the case, Ms. Woeburne."

Suddenly, and for no apparent reason: she felt a twinge of regrettable, unlucky cold.

Mr. LaCroix was still talking. He had not seen her blood thicken in that half-moment. "We could, as you said, ignore them and wait for the eventual sedition. Nothing is forcing me to intervene now. At the same time, we have no guarantees their little coup d'état would prevent an assault upon my Domain. That, too, would fail, but I'd prefer to not deal with it. Sabbat to the south border, Kuei-jin at our coast. We have enough to contend with in the Americas without ten years of Anarch kamikazes. It isn't worth the Masquerade cleaning. It isn't worth the damage control. But I require more justification," he finished, and with a clack of the teeth, pointed at his. "Than a bleeding nose. No offense meant to yours, of course."

"None," Ms. Woeburne told him. He offered her another tissue. She declined.

There are some hindsights you ought not think about if you are a Prince-Childe and you intend to survive.

"At any rate, there you have it: it's a delay, more than it is anything else." Mr. LaCroix was tired. The cards shuffled, sorted, collapsed back under the table and into his hand. Ms. Woeburne felt a strange heat step-in after the cold, as it often does with frostbite, like salt water in the lungs. She found it difficult to swallow and stare. "If this were any other field than LA, I'd have them both paraded out and beheaded. In the meantime, I will have to do what it is that I can."

The car was doused in a blast of overpass light; the contours of her cheeks disappeared, the yellows and reds left his neat hair. It seemed the space between their bodies was much less than before. Foreheads and eye whites and streetlamps coalesced, erasing the faces in the space of a breath, until they smoothed out into eggs, like solid milk, like skulls.

Had they not both been so angry, so _right_ , she might've done as good as killed herself. She might've asked the cost.

When the car stopped, Mr. LaCroix and Ms. Woeburne stepped out, not bothering to wait for his escort to open the car doors. Sinister masonry around them; Abrams's building looked to be a jewelry parlor, an artiste's attempt to out-class his world, but you know by now it wasn't. Unwelcoming windows looked out like fish eyes. It was humid; Hollywood crawled sporadically, a mix of tourists, lost drinkers, plain-clothes prostitutes and human boys who wore their bandanas like flags. The low breeze smelled of rain and fresh tortillas, of vendor carts. For all the grandstanding that goes on inside a Toreador den, Golden Age Jewelry put on dim lights and dark doors, an attempt not to take your attention. You couldn't walk in off the front entrance, not off the street. You could turn none of the lukewarm brass knobs.

S.W. glanced up, squinted high. This is what they do, her clan: top-to-bottom, deconstructing, taking things apart. It was a stout, grinning, muscular façade for a Baron's building. She thought of Fort Knox, bakeries, old fire stations. Abrams's name boasted over the entrance in condescending gold. Shatter-proof over pearls, necklaces and wristwatches were laid out behind the glass, displays cut out from these red brick walls. Palm trees hung their claws over chain-linked alleys. The Foreman watched some thick-bodied, BluBlocker doorman shoo a gaggle of coast girls from the windows before he acknowledged them. There was a man behind her—one of their own—with his thumb on the contour of a pistol, a hand on the pocket of his coat. Ms. Woeburne didn't notice his face. She never really does.

And there was no ceremony. The doorman ghoul directed both Ventrue off the sodden road, pointing them down a short, grim, unlit lane to the side-door. It was bronze and brandished, of all the ludicrous things, a ram's head knocker—classic, grimly out-of-place. None of their party moved. Not right away. There was an odd smell to this neighborhood. It's an aroma that can't be pinned down—delicate, drunken; sultry, strong; scotch, cigars, caramel popcorn. You couldn't read the guard's expression from behind his brutish sunglasses. Ms. Woeburne and Mr. LaCroix shared an indignant, commiserating look.

Nodded-in by a Toreador's hound. As if it was not going badly enough.

Ms. Woeburne's hinges felt tight and punitive as she stepped along the sidewalk with her cuffs neatly buttoned, her back straight. Patricians prefer marble. Patricians prefer cold colors, a lot of light, not mafioso cinderblock, and there was no question these Patricians are out of their natural habitat. The Prince told their gunmen, those neonates with no faces, to wait in the limousine. Driver and passenger-side nodded. They sat.

"Speaking freely, sir," she said as Mr. LaCroix turned back around. The car windows rolled shut. They were escorted to the entrance with threadbare, voiceless courtesy. Woeburne stepped over a crushed soda can and her patience was lowering. "You said damage control? I hope it's all right if I suspect something to you."

The Prince's expression was impatient below the poor lamplight; he'd a dislike for needless questions, for having to be asked. "Clearly you already do. And what do you make of it? Tell me what you 'suspect'."

She didn't care for how he said the word. S.W. squared herself. "It's a deduction. More than anything else. I'd think this would have to be. A cover up, that is. You can't rely upon someone's opinion, I know; all the same, there's my best guess. It didn't sound—it was only a few minutes, mind you, that conversation—but it didn't sound like Abrams was gathering a jury. Not against me. In fact," she snapped, forearms twanging, something that felt like static lightning.

"In fact _what_ , Ms. Woeburne?" The impatience did not lessen with their approach to that bronze door.

"In fact I wouldn't be out of my head to want to prosecute. Restraint. Abduction. It's… attempted manslaughter. Is that a—? I don't know; I don't know the technical term." Two nails pinched the infinitesimal dip between the bridge of her nose and her skull. "What we don't have to debate is that an Anarch entity held me against my will. For days. Days. Here's your evidence: look at my hands. My poor hands. They destroyed my apartment. He broke my bloody nose."

Mr. LaCroix's look said _'silence,'_ but he regarded Ms. Woeburne's poor hands with a righteous, tutting shake of his head. The bridge of her snout still stung. She couldn't rest her glasses on them. But S.W.'s better hand worked well enough to reach out, grab the unlocked, knockered door, and hold it open for him. The Prince stepped past her and into the warmly-lit hall.

"Small wonder Abrams wants to separate himself from that interrogation now. I'm not challenging your judgment, sir. Honestly. But in light of what you just told me—considering the situation between them—I don't see why we can't pardon Hollywood, make our case against Rodriguez, and that's that. I don't see why we can't indict the bastard."

 _Son-of-a-bitch_ would've been her first choice, but the Prince didn't care for metaphor in his profanity, and so he didn't care for it in hers.

Mr. LaCroix's eyebrow ascended as he passed her there. "That might be a tad more viable if you had not already attempted to manslaughter him."

"Not before they murdered Mr. de Luca." Ms. Woeburne's voice was down to a harsh whisper now. "Besides, it was defensive. It was practically self-defense."

She followed him inside, lowering Abrams Jewelry's weighted door so it did not slam behind the Prince. A long, textured hallway let them in; lights scalloped on the salmon walls like fireplaces; the air tasted of amber, and it was a little too warm. No one was there to take their coats. Ceiling fans led them forward, instead; still, ominous blades, imitation bronze. Here is a taste of opulence, the strut and the bluster. It was elm paneling, most likely, and the wallcover was redder than it was pink. It looked like velvet stripped straight from dinner theater. Faded pictures beamed from their frames: Abrams grinning and slinging an arm around Bogart, Sinatra, Nicholson; Abrams pecking a showman's kiss on Judy Garland's rouged cheek. Their eyes wrinkled, paralyzed in sepia. S.W. felt irrationally disturbed, and so she hurried on, fixing her stare at the wood parquet.

"Indeed. An insult you were sorely unsuccessful in ever proving to me," the Prince observed. Ms. Woeburne flustered. Her sensibilities went dry and spiky at the implication of dishonesty.

"Mr. LaCroix," she said sharply. They were edgy, skeptical, and not altogether pleased with one another. Sire and Childe were almost the same height clapping along on their nice shoes.

"I know, of course, that you told me the truth. I am simply trying to illustrate for you how the Toreador will make cardboard out of your claims," he told her. It eased the dubious arch of S.W.'s eyebrows and stopped up whatever defense she might've thrown. It did not, however, restore Ms. Woeburne's brisk, deputy aplomb. Her heels clicked sadly on the floor as they walked. She bit on the insides of her mouth.

"There are a great many points you should take into account before threatening litigation against a Baron. First, this: Whatever the accusations against him, Mr. de Luca's responsibility was to uphold the Masquerade. No more, no less. I have no regrets about appointing him to police my borders. He was, by all means, an excellent officer, as are you. Don't drag your feet." Ms. Woeburne straightened her toes. "There's the history for you, at any rate. Now here's the turn. He most certainly _was_ acting outside his district."

"No, that's not right. I'm sorry. No. I looked through that data. I went through every—"

Mr. LaCroix wrenched a smile at her—closed, understated, backhanded. It was the smile of a man who knows his ace is guarded well. "Outside Los Angeles, outside my jurisdiction, outside my ability to track. You understand?"

So there it is: the malignant root of all these muffled transgressions and sneaky potshots.

And, because Ms. Woeburne did understand, she nodded. You cannot sacrifice a roof for the dignity of a shingle. The good corporal was not about to complain.

That did not mean she had to like it.

"I was only aware of this after-the-fact, mind you. I issued no kill-order; I merely trusted my soldier's judgment. Unfortunately, but predictably, the Anarch Party does not respect this distinction. It's a series of unlucky events. Mr. de Luca was usually more tactful," the Prince sighed. S.W. was not amiss to how loudly he said so. Confidence, yes—temper, too—but he had specifically waited until they'd walked into Baron Hollywood's haven to explain. Was it a warning, a flash of the full house? Surely Isaac wouldn't fall for that. Surely there'd be something else for the Party to do.

"I won't—I'm not arguing with you. It makes sense, sir. It never didn't make sense. But I would have appreciated a note. That's all." A stern, crackling look over one shoulder; a juniper twig of an attitude. That was Ms. Woeburne tonight, and many other nights, too. Fleshy yellows and blues were mottled beneath a smear of cosmetic. She'd thought, for once, he might've backed off. "I realize that a Prince is held suspect for just about everything that could go wrong."

Mr. LaCroix paused to advise her, then, and they came to a full stop as he regarded his soldier, laying a councilor's hand upon Ms. Woeburne's arm. She halted. They faced one another between two rows of drunkenly seashell lights.

"Abrams has his suspicions, yes; I, too, have mine. So, you see—while it was surprising—your misfortune with those files was also quite inconvenient to you. It was a very ill time for you to be vicious. I realize this was not some premeditated thing, Ms. Woeburne, and I obviously sent you on your way down that street. I am sorry for that. I feel somehow responsible. We had no idea they would intercept you; I had no idea, you understand. But what's done is done, and as a consequence, Baron Hollywood could easily accuse you of spying or worse. Do you appreciate my predicament? Picking a spat with the Anarchs regarding Mr. de Luca's indiscretions was the last note on my agenda, but when it comes to public affairs, you are an extension of me. It's a problem. It is also the reason I couldn't license a raid on Rodriguez's properties, despite my fears his people had taken you. We are lucky you kept your tongue snug between your teeth. A false confession might be disastrous."

There is danger that comes with a title. There's a risk with responsibility you have to take. Outside his jurisdiction but inside the enemy line. _Manufacture a chance._ There was a swelling like a hazelnut in the gulch of Ms. Woeburne's throat.

"It might," she said.

He held on a moment longer.

"It might."

Another smile.

S.W. managed one of her own before LaCroix pivoted, stepped, and steered them forward. Another blank-eyed ghoul unlocked two sets of double-doors at the end of this great hall, saying nothing. He needn't. His master had obviously been expecting more prestigious company than some bumbling Broad offshoot. Sebastian guessed correctly; Abrams had arranged himself a little summit, a forum in miniature, inviting a Prince by speaking down to his Childe.

LaCroix stopped one final time before they entered. This time, she turned to face him only partway. "Keep one last thing in mind, Ms. Woeburne. Why he's sticking a thumb into our affairs is obvious: the Baron wants assurances we won't press your issue against his general. He and I both recognize this is an explosive situation. It can't devolve into an inquest—not without digging up a very long line of questionable acts on either side." His palms cupped Ms. Woeburne's shoulders; it was a bracing action, hardly a warning, so she fought not to feel the latter. But it was no friendship, and it was no use. The goosebumps pimpled like static, regiments down her vertebrae, a cruel, gutless charge. Her twisted her the rest of the way around. "It's not as though I am overlooking the offense to you. We will have our compensation. You will have your say. But I am hoping, for now, to draw a blanket over the worst of it, and to settle our bickering until another night. Isaac claims no involvement; I claim no involvement. Hogwash, of course, but necessarily so. I think you appreciate this as my warden, and as someone I trust. You are dependable, so I have been honest, and I have been clear. We want to exert pressure upon those who wrong us, Ms. Woeburne. We do not want war with them."

Then he gave her arms a quick, comradely squeeze, and Ms. Woeburne pulled open the last door of tonight, determined to exert all the pressure she could.

The moxie collapsed when they strode in, and Nines Rodriguez stood up.

Isaac made a casual show of not noticing visitors, but the Brujah stood immediately, his chair scraping tile. It was not respect, no. His stare was metallic and conveyed nothing. His back stiffened beneath coat leather that hid all the scratches. The set of his jawbone looked like something that would shut a windpipe. Ms. Woeburne floundered. She thought:

_A.) Yank the pistol from the doorman's thigh and fire straight through that empty blue eye_

or

 _B.) About-face and sprint back onto the street_.

In a brilliant display of "Plan C," the Ventrue clamped shut and froze.

"Why, would you look who it is. Look who's banging around the neighborhood. Prince LaCroix!" Hollywood's strutting raj swooped up to welcome the Ventrue as though he'd been a dear old friend. They shook hands beneath the Anarch's spotted green tie and across his desk, cluttered with cinema memorabilia and photographs; both politicians' grips were menacingly cool. LaCroix's lips pressed into a thin, disdainful line to counter Abrams's shameless grin. "What a surprise. And what a pleasure. Welcome to my humble home. Please, make yourselves comfortable. That goes for you, too, Ms. Woeburne. I'm Isaac. Glad to finally meet you."

The sham greeting made LaCroix abandon his officer, left five steps behind him, smacked momentarily dumb. Rodriguez's presence was like a black hole in the luxury room. She looked everywhere and nowhere as all the nerve endings began to curl from her nailbeds, to tuck themselves away.

 _'Son-of-a-bitch,'_ shot across S.W.'s mind before she could wipe off the shock.

Somehow, the Foreman kicked forward, thrusting out one arm. She grabbed and clutched without feeling any skin. But Abrams's mafia ring, hoarier than his mop of slick gray, was a kitschy barb where it stuck out beneath her fingers. Crowsfeet curled handsomely around Broadway gold eyes. He held on for an uncomfortable five seconds before letting go.

"You already know Mr. Rodriguez," Isaac remembered, not wanting to miss it, not wanting to leave anyone out.

"Hello," she conceded. It was iron. It was enough.

LaCroix looked at Abrams like one might a moderately offensive parasite—a squirming leech or persistent bee, tolerated only for the practical purpose it served. Rodriguez he ignored entirely. Ms. Woeburne fixated robotically on the first Baron, desperate to avoid finding the second; it was the only coping mechanism that came naturally.

Nines Rodriguez must have been used to being shunned by this point. In fact, he said nothing at all to acknowledge Prince Los Angeles, either, a man whose nomination had chased out the old honor packs of this city. Rodriguez did very little, actually. The Brujah's fists were at his sides, exaggerating their size, looking like an effort to intimidate her. S.W. made up her own. Sons-of-bitches: a silver-spoon owl, transparently friendly, outdated and sumptuous green plum cologne; a small general, unspoken, mouth inexpressive, brick wall, barbarous geometry, not bothering to be appropriate. It was ridiculous. Should have been ridiculous—but there are emotions other than enmity in meeting a pair of hands that almost killed you.

The things Ms. Woeburne does not prepare for are always those that promise to dismantle her, to pluck off her rank stripes, stomp on her brains. She never expects fear. It pulled faint, gauzy veins towards the centers of her eyes; suddenly, the Ventrue knew that if she looked at him, the panic would overtake the anger, steal her words. Having him here was that dark negative space in the room. He was like the dog that makes eye-contact just to lunge for your pipes.

Insolent kingfish and his barking mutt. She hated them both.

"Sit, please," Hollywood bid them, two-bit foreplay to a parlor trick. Nobody did. His audience was too cold-eyed and critical for minor magics—no saw, no voodoo, no levitating coffee tables. They looked strange together in this decadent, smoky lounge; three did not belong; can you guess who among them is the sorest thumb in the diamond print and the waft of old China, diluted, dramatic, poured into a Western man's cup? "Can I get you a drink? No? Well, I suppose we're all work and no play. Too bad. But it is probably best we start in on our business."

Smug, languid, patriarchal. Isaac broke the norm and reclined into his desk chair. S.W. was half expecting the Toreador might chuck custom entirely and toss those worn-in loafers up.

"Our business. I agree. Here is mine: I see no reason for Ms. Woeburne's involvement in this." Mr. LaCroix's "start in" was abrupt, uncompromising, and full of the displeasure written across a crisp colonial face. He made no effort at niceties, to return the welcome. S.W. figured she ought to be insulted, but what good would that do? To be frank—and maybe a little pigheaded—when he'd summoned her across this ocean, Ms. Woeburne felt so bitterly _sure_ grooming for a cabinet seat was about to commence.

"I hoped we could handle this like civilized people," Abrams suggested. The Foreman's wounded hand twitched.

"A fine proposition, Isaac." She glanced towards the Prince at her left. His whites glinted, reminding her of salt; his tone was a straight-razor going for the biggest artery. "Except you've mismarked where the problem is. If this were 'uncivil,' I would have brought my cohort inside. If this were 'uncivil,' you would not be sitting before me from the comfort of your home. So you can see I have no problem with civility. Collar your hound and perhaps we shall be 'civil' yet."

The Brujah's teeth were grinding, but he wasn't spared a glance, not even a sidelong one, for warlords merit nothing from those kings who push their little halls down.

Baron Hollywood sighed, his smile sliding off-kilter. It looked oddly like he enjoyed the overtures, letting the flattery swish across his tongue. "That's not an option, I'm afraid." A bushy eyebrow quirked. He switched gears, regarding the ancilla, who boxed her posture to prove her fearlessness. It was as much of a farce as his happy manners. The Toreador's poise lived in how he relaxed, and in how one heel drummed patterns on his warm-wood floor. "It's not a settlement if all the parties aren't participating. I'm sure I don't need to tell either of you that. Besides, my friend has a place in this conversation if yours does, I'd imagine."

"Ms. Woeburne has no place," Prince LaCroix shot back immediately. The heat of the stained glass and mellow light turned his rust-blond crown a pale, powder orange. Hers looked blacker than it had ever been. "But I see you are intent on play-acting the intermediary about this, and we are already here. Let's do away with the pretexts. Let's toss the red herrings away. Exactly what are your terms?"

Abrams's blink was confused, mildly taken aback, absolutely false. Ms. Woeburne caught the resentment in Mr. LaCroix's face. She did not catch any part of Nines. Fantasies in this room: of immortality, of safety, of ramming your knuckles through that smart, slack, glittering Toreador sneer.

"Prince," Isaac began, slow and nettling. His charm was the molasses plus arsenic kind. "This wasn't supposed to be a bargaining session. I only wanted to touch base with my friends in the tower. And I apologize if I sounded litigious before; there's no need to turn this formal. I won't shy from the issue. Some missteps were made over the past few nights, and they need to be settled before we leave anyone with incorrect notions—about this agreement, or about our borders. Rumors are wildfire in my Barony these days, and I'm sure downtown can say the same. It's not good business. Besides, you know I can't stand gossip." Another ringlet of grin. He aimed it at Ms. Woeburne. "My colleague understands his mistake. I hope you aren't the type to hold a grudge."

S.W. pursed around a dry lime of a comeback. "I was maybe fifteen seconds from being diablerized, Mr. Abrams. I'm sorry—you're asking if I hold a grudge?"

It was a lot to say for someone expected to stand there frostily and say nothing at all. LaCroix waited for him to answer her. There was no reason in particular to think he might.

Isaac looked genuinely repentant. He picked an auto model from its stand upon his desk, vintage Ferrari, flicking at the delicate rearview windows. It was the fidgeting of a theatrical guilty conscience: rueful, apparent, but not necessarily true. "Yes. I'm awfully sorry you were placed in that situation, Ms. Woeburne. Obscene. Nines has assured me the perpetrator was dealt with. But he was already half-dead, so I suppose you didn't have much trouble looking out for yourself, after all." His tone swung one-hundred-and-eighty degrees, ashamed and contrite to icepick suspicion. Ms. Woeburne's carpals throbbed harder. The needle-head ghosts of puncture wounds to her neck were suddenly, intolerably itchy, and she fought not to scratch.

"I suppose the perpetrator was not counting on the prisoner being in a condition to defend herself, Mr. Abrams," she told him. Nines stared at her with the dispassionate, soulless look of a man on death row.

"Please," the Toreador said, smile dripping fraud friendship, and it made Ms. Woeburne's innards heave. "Call me Isaac."

Mr. LaCroix was quick to rescue her. She could not have said that at any other time. "Well," he spat. "There you have it. You wanted her word, and you have it. I trust there is no need to put my name on paper. Is that settled to your liking, Abrams, or must we endure this much longer?"

"Not much longer, Prince." Snide old patron; he put back the hotrod-red automobile with a slack wrist and very peculiar sort of disrespect. Nines Rodriguez had crossed his arms as though he was angry, or as though he was cold. "Wouldn't dream of inconveniencing you. And no, I don't need a signature. Your good faith will do."

"I'm sure," the Prince snapped.

"I'm glad." Both of them, Sire and Childe, roiled. Isaac either didn't notice or didn't care. "I just wanted to look you in the eye when we talked about this. Made sure we were seeing things the same way. You know how I work: personal touch," he said, but it was not self-depreciation; it was a verbal smack-and-a-wink. "Old-fashioned of me, I realize. It's not my style to relax in an office and twiddle my thumbs while our neighbors persist in killing each other, especially over a misunderstanding. It wasn't—"

"Misunderstanding?"

It came from Ms. Woeburne. Prince LaCroix didn't bother shushing her this time; she couldn't bite her tongue. Perhaps he didn't want her to. The hostility rolled and coiled, making her bigger, making her sharp.

"Well, yes, if you want to call it that. Sure. We can see that some accidents were—"

"I'm sorry, sir. Mr. Abrams. I had no idea I was accidentally imprisoned—my mistake." She sliced it. The sarcasm was acidic and scrunched the Ventrue's nose, wrinkling it up, coordinating the pains. "Oh, no. I don't hold a grudge. Not at all. This changes everything. I can see—since you've been so kind in telling me so—that I was just a bit confused. It wasn't torture. I just didn't understand. Now I've got a better picture. Now I—"

"This 'picture' include the truck you brought down on me?"

She looked at him. She did not see anything. So she could not see, in a meaningful way, how the Brujah's snarl was flawed—how it overwrote, imperfectly, a grimace, a horror—and when the aggression jutted out her chin, how Nines Rodriguez's fell to guard his throat.

"Isaac," Mr. LaCroix said, "please inform your co-conspirator that he is not permitted to speak to my cabinet."

"I am speaking to anyone I want. This was a dirty little hit-job you snakes tried to pull on me. I am not going to plea bargain a stab at my life. I am not going to—"

"Nines," Isaac told him. There was something momentous about his cavalier, backhanded calm. "I think you've said it all."

The lost Baron of the Angels didn't make one _I-am-not_ stand.

"Actually, our perspectives on this are closer than you think, Prince. I don't doubt you question the circumstances that led, however directly or indirectly, to what we've got here. And that's exactly it: so do we. Whatever your girl's motives were, Nines had every reason to suspect she was working on your orders," Abrams argued—easy, breezy dismissal. Ms. Woeburne's hair follicles stood on end at being reduced to "your girl." Isaac would never have noticed; he felt comfortable within chintz-and-glitz Hollywood, a place he'd shaped for more than a century. He was casual and offhand. He might as well have been selling tickets. "Now, I understand this wasn't the case. Couldn't have been. You wouldn't approve something like that. But you can't deny she could just as well have been a spy."

"I'm not," Ms. Woeburne insisted, furious, undecided on whether or not she was telling a lie. "You have no evidence. You have no call. Suppose what you'd like when you're talking together; it doesn't change the facts. I wasn't. I'm not."

"But you could've been. She could've been an assassin, for all we knew at the time." Abrams flashed her that same soft-touch, so-sorry-about-this grin. "And, whatever the reason, she did significant violence against him. Violence is hard to write off these nights. It was completely within my associate's rights—some might say it was his responsibility—to investigate in whatever ways were available to him."

S.W. choked. The Ventrue's shoulders had jumped, stiffened, and turned to bedrock beneath her ears. "What did you say?" she wanted to know. "What do you mean to tell me? I misunderstood you. Responsibility. What did you mean? _What_ did you say?"

It was a visible pop; a precipice of outrage, of swinging of whip, of screaming her head off. There were Anarchs in communion. They were an awful, depraved partnership. She might _have_ screamed at them had it not been for the something someone else said.

Mr. LaCroix's martial hand at the back of her neck. It was a brief, snip-to-the-quick gesture, a drop of ice cubes into a coffee mug. She dropped both arms and bit her teeth together and tried—she did try—to uncoil.

"This is enough. We've settled what needs to be settled, and we will entertain your insecurity no longer." The Prince gave them a short end. His fingertips had closed around the ridges of Ms. Woeburne's spine. She took a deep, useless breath. Her sense of justice was a wasp's nest an Anarch had kicked. It made her feel red-eyed and drunk. "You and I are beyond finished here. Ms. Woeburne will not be pressing the issue against you or your collaborators. I assume that is what you wanted to hear, yes?"

Baron Hollywood smiled.

"Yes," he said, no more.

Mr. LaCroix's lip curled—a snide, a belittling twist of muscle that communicated more than it should've. "Very well. Do not forget that we expect the same prudence from your organization. And Mr. Rodriguez." The Prince tossed him an impervious look. "I am obligated to forewarn you: If you take it upon yourself to come near my representatives again, be assured, truce or no truce, I will sign a Blood Hunt."

He said nothing. But the Wolf-Prince looked away.

She could not see if there was more reaction, could not make herself face those fists and those winter colors in time. Guiding his corporal by her collar, new Prince Los Angeles swiveled on his heels. His strides were measured, discontent, exact. Ms. Woeburne stumbled only once, and she did not wish anyone goodbye.

It wasn't a total disaster. It didn't do half the damage they had.


	25. Elementary

Officer Chunk had been burning the midnight oil.

The off-hours of predawn, lunchtime, and coffee breaks—also known as "most of his free time"—he had case file _Find Lily Harris's Boss_. And, rec-room camera codes aside, Bernie had primarily discovered this: Venture Tower has too many employees.

Balancing working hours with this private eye stunt was no walk in the park. Research held him downtown late, which meant Bernie missed his favorite shows (didn't even have time for the _Law & Order _reruns), and usually a bus or two. Which meant he had to walk four blocks to an alternate stop, sweating through his armpits in this gelatin LA heat, or flag a taxi, and you know how cab meters eat up your mad money. The whole thing was a trial in exhaustion. When he closed up yesterday, the old Chunkster was dog-tired—tired enough to snore through three alarms the next evening, miss breakfast (or was that dinner?), and twist an ankle hurrying to punch in. Those were the drawbacks of having the conscience he did.

Conscience is a relative thing, though. Officer Chunk would have told you not to mind that distinguished, police-ish badge glistening handsomely at his left breastbone; he was just an Average Joe doing what any other upright, wholesome Average Joe would've. There's no calling in sick to good citizenship. If, for tonight, civic duty meant paper-hunting and a burrito-on-the-go, then this Joe was happy to board up in his office, mug in hand, and hunt paper until everything was resolved.

If he had an office, that is.

As it happened, Bernie was stuck using the crappy surveillance monitors tucked away in a discreet corner of Venture's public atrium, fighting with an overtaxed old keyboard. The shift key stuck every three sentences. And, though he couldn't imagine why, someone had apparently run off with the mouse ball. Must've been on a different patrolman's night. Krantz suspected the cleaning staff; What's-Her-Name-With-The-Mole always did look like she was up to no good.

But you can't follow every case. You have to prioritize. He popped his knuckles over the console, and the glow highlighted him—red palm heels, Bogart chin dimple, and the youth of eye whites that are hopeful, that reflect what they can see.

There were a couple details about this particular case Chunk ranked higher than others, things a trained officer oughtn't miss. The first of those being that Ms. Harris, as worried and carrot-topped and kid-faced as she was, apparently found out about Ms. Woeburne's government status from a credible source. He couldn't be sure if the missing-person herself clued the poor kid in before this fiasco, or if she'd just upturned some suspicious correspondence. But there was no doubt in the crime scene or the report. He had seen the bloodspots and broken mirror in that gray, swank suite. Looked as though someone's head had been grabbed from behind and smashed right into it. Lily stood nearby with hands glued to her face while Bernie picked up glass, tongue stuck from the side of his mouth, wielding a tweezer borrowed from the bathroom cabinet to drop each shard in its own plastic bag. He'd been painstakingly careful. They sat in a case on his dinner table—beneath a lamp, next to a fingerprint kit his brother sold him some years ago. Whoever broke in there must've used gloves.

Either that, or maybe Ms. CIA/FBI faked her disappearance. That was looking more and more likely to him. Might've been crazy to stick on like this, nosing into agency business—maybe dangerous, something regular folks ought to stay away from. But Chunk was a man accustomed to the concept of danger. He had principles. He had the tenacity not to let it go.

And he really couldn't just up and leave Ms. Harris hanging out in the breeze, could he? Anxious and scared as she was. Now, justice is blind, but Chunk had always been a sucker for damsels-in-distress. Besides, Lily really did seem like a sweet kid. Even if her instincts were wrong, her zeal was admirable; in two years of work, of triple-checking the main floor locks, Krantz never felt the same kind of concern for his own boss that she apparently did for Ms. Woeburne. That's not to say he didn't take his responsibilities seriously, because everyone who knew Bernie knew he was the most serious badge you could've been, but he stayed on his side of that tough blue line. Security never got personal with an experienced guard. It was heartwarming to see somebody else care like that, though, especially the next generation of cops, Samaritans, and service-people. He should really bring that girl some pamphlets from the recruitment desk. And to think everyone said that these millennials were all pot-smoking, shot-up, graffiti-scrawling hooligans.

He'd advised her not to spread this around, though. Chunk was a firm believer in trusting your government and tried to walk-the-walk that belief into others, but in certain times—at certain heights—politicians start turning on the people its soldiers protect. Getting involved in top-secrets isn't something you ought to do accidentally or rashly. He understood she was concerned, Bernie explained; who wouldn't see that? But there's a time to be emotional and a time to be cold, hard smart. No telling what kind of trouble knowing a spy might get innocent some bystanders into; hot-info like that could make you a target lickity-split, faster than one of those Italian super-squad-cars. She was lucky to have come to him first.

Emotion was up past its bedtime; tuck it away, he'd said, put it to rest. Officer Chunk could handle the cold and the smart.

Google hadn't been especially illuminating, though. He consulted his notes for another idea.

Mouse clicks and chair wheels clacked behind him. Bernie, aware of his environment in a way only warriors can be, took a backwards glance at Ms. Joelle where she worked the front desk. All was well in Venture tonight. She sat model-straight at her station across the empty, echoing lobby, the dark stone surrounding them, Lefevre's fingers tipping faster than seemed possible, red suit waiting for another black one to stride in.

That's the other thing about investigations: Don't assume you can't learn things from people outside the security circle. It's a personal tenet that had helped him out a thousand times before, or at least more than fifteen. In his early days on beat patrol, Bernie talked to everyone—helloed-at and good-morninged every grocery-shopper, teacher, crossing guard, backpacked teenager and his mom that went strolling on by. Wacco Taco, the charter school, the Junior Jumps Park and Playground, and The Stationarium. You could say the entire neighborhood knew him back then.

Life had taken Krantz other places since those days, but no matter what he guards—the caterpillar carousel or corporate sector lobbies full of diplomats and CEOs—he still believes, more than anything else, in still holding on to that friendly-faced, sharp-nosed set of blues on the sidewalk. He believes the best policeperson is a soldier you can confide in. The type that counsels DARE programs, only armed with a nightstick and a terrible knowledge of the monsters crawling out there, the ones just waiting for innocent eighth-graders to snatch up. You learn fast to keep your ear to the ground in this line of work. Once the package delivery lady even dropped a tip about where a pack of high-schoolers were popping wheelies behind The Station(arium)'s parking lot.

So he'd asked his partner, as he sometimes thought of her, working back-to-back across this skyscraper, for a little extra muscle. They were the first line of defense. They had to watch out, one for the other. Specifically, Bernie requested that she forward him any recent staff changes or failures to check-in, but… well, Ms. Joelle was always awful busy. She didn't have the opportunity to stop and chat mid-shift. Which was perfectly understandable. You could see how overworked that woman was in the way she sat right on the edge of her seat, there; crimson shawl and attentive posture; typing one-hundred miles an hour. Almost never tore her pretty eyes away from that computer screen. Didn't even hear you, sometimes… sometimes not even when you spoke to her directly. Scooted her swivel-chair away and snatched up the telephone when he'd approached the front desk a minute ago; Chunk hadn't exactly heard it ring, but LaCroix Foundation must keep you on your toes like that. He could certainly appreciate the work ethic. Personnel questions and company books would have to wait until later.

In the meantime, though, a search engine stared at him, waiting for input. Sleuths have to be versatile, and Officer Krantz could play it by ear with the best of them. The World Wide Web admittedly wasn't his most comfortable domain, though. In terms of detectives, Officer Krantz saw himself as less of a Munch and more of a Stabler: dogged, eagle-eyed and a family-first father to his impressionable kids.

If he had any kids, that is, or a family.

Besides his brothers. All law enforcers, best damn boys you'd ever hope to meet. Bernie liked to call them The Brothers in Arms.

Chunk re-folded his lunch, a sadly collapsing Bandito Burrito, taking a mighty bite of meat, garlic and soggy lettuce. He picked just the wrong moment to chew. Had the wilting wrap obscured his vision a little less in those next few seconds, Bernie might have seen Mr. Man Himself enter—Sebastian LaCroix, purveyor of business, executive commander, and far-off distributor of paychecks. Officer Krantz might also have noticed Mr. LaCroix's scowl, a crease in a sheet of loose-leaf. Possibly, he may even have spotted the staunch, sullen, serial-number woman with him—a familiar, unspectacularly feminine face with no name attached.

Unfortunately for Chunk, he didn't register either until both Ventrue had already passed him by. They walked right in and no one screened their cards. The metal detector was off. As you'd imagine, this little fact was a fantastic balm for Mr. LaCroix's current displeasure with life. He overlooked Lefevre entirely, ignoring her fulsome welcomes, to glower at the back of Bernie's chair.

Who had just dropped a slip of hamburger on the keyboard, and was trying to finger it up without leaving a stain.

When the forked-shouldered shadow didn't give its owner away, LaCroix announced himself with an indignant, loud _'AHEM.'_ His sound was less like congestion and more like a bark, a peeved Doberman Pinscher. Krantz jumped in place. The full burrito hit computer keys with a sodden _'thwup.'_

Chunk thought Mr. LaCroix was usually a pretty nice person, so far as venture capitalists go. You met some interesting folks working for him, at any rate; eccentric upper-crusters were always filtering in and out. Strangely enough—even with all the odd traffic that swept by him night-after-night—Officer Krantz still had no real inkling as to what, exactly, his boss did. There were always people moving even when the foyer seemed silent as a grave. A lot of guests seemed to be of foreign descent, primarily European, which led him to suppose they must've run some kind of multinational. A couple of said guests were really jaw-dropping women, too, Bernie had noticed, which wasn't a huge surprise. Mr. LaCroix was a handsome guy. (Come to think of it: A lot of said guests were good-looking guys, too, if that was more his thing. Can't be presuming about people's business these days. Love is love, don't you know it.)

Point being: Boss was a decent sort. Particularly decent for the amount of stress he was probably under—holding meetings at ungodly hours, dashing overseas at the drop of a pin. A man couldn't settle like that. Chunk thought the white-collar lifestyle was overrated.

Which was why he didn't blame Mr. LaCroix for hollering at Ms. Joelle, "What in the hell is it I am paying the security for?" and jerking a thumb in his direction.

Lefevre's scarlet shoulders gave an uninterested shrug. She had gone back to her computer and her tip-tip-tip.

"You don't know. Color me surprised. I am, in no way, shocked to discover that no one at my front desk can tell me a damned thing about what is going on in this building." LaCroix was acerbic and unforgiving, an overwrought bowstring. His glare turned from shrinking Bernie to sear a neat little hole through Joelle's candy-red indifference. She grimaced, her impervious air barely flaking.

"I apologize; so sorry," she said, sweet and effortless as a summer breeze. There was nothing and everything respectful about her practiced good-evening. Lefevre swooped up to pinprick heels and picked up the telephone. She wore a slick red ribbon in the coppery topknot today. She oozed a sugary, tropical, ripe fruit perfume. "I didn't hear your question, monsieur. I am already dialing HR."

LaCroix scoffed, and it sounded disgusted, or like maybe he had to sneeze. "Don't bother. I don't have the time or patience. Consider yourselves lucky for that—both of you," he added. Joelle didn't quite seem to hear that, either, judging from the low-lidded mildness of her face. Bernie heard it, though. He followed her lead and said nothing, but started feeling pale. "I would be very grateful if you'd see to it that, when someone enters this building, they are actually _seen_. Do not let me come downstairs to find either of you idling again."

"Bien sûr, Mr. LaCroix. It won't happen again. Shall I update you on the changes to your agenda?"

Either Sebastian LaCroix was easily distracted, or Ms. Joelle had a special way of distracting everyone. "What changes?" he demanded, a dent twisting between the arc of his brows. The nameless lady behind him stood unsmiling, unmoving, her arms rifler-still.

"Why, yours, of course. You left, monsieur, on urgent business. I have shuffled the rest of your plans to make room."

"Oh. Yes. Of course." There was something disingenuous (and a touch confused) about the way he parroted her. There was a frowning pause. LaCroix tightened and untightened the knot of his dismal blue tie. "I don't want to deal with it. I have more waiting; I need to make a few calls. You should know I am going to be occupied. I am always occupied when I come back from Hollywood. Twenty minutes, at minimum."

"As you like, sir, always. It is done. I am sending a copy of the schedule upstairs, n'est-ce pas?"

"Good," he said, like a period point. "Yes. Do."

She did. Bernie took up a napkin, and he dabbed a single speck of sauce off the leg of his slacks.

That was almost the curtain call for everyone's night.

But here is where the funny thing you won't believe happened.

Lefevre was finished and on to the next task beeping for her attention, but there was a little more to be said, he guessed, between the two execs who just strode in. They were still standing about when Krantz looked up from the spicy smear his burrito made. Something eerie, and there was no explaining what, prickled through the man's spine then, to see them both there. They didn't look well. Gave him willies. Willies, to watch the bodies—which was an insensitive way of putting it, but the word that fell out—stiff and compact and fearfully intense at idle, without doing much at all. The ceiling lights must have been washing them out. Even so, Bernie knew it was important, and rude as it was, he couldn't stop staring. Mr. LaCroix about-faced upon the dark-haired lurk of a woman. His temper dropped, but the rigidness of his joints was unnatural. She blinked back at him, a patient prefect. Maybe they were related. There weren't many physical similarities. But he had never seen a pair of people look so somehow alike.

"Now, Ms. Woeburne," he told her, and that was the gut feeling, that was the _zing!_ "Wait there one moment. Joelle will arrange for a driver take you home."

Chunk choked on a mouthful of nothing.

" _'_ Ms. Woeburne?" he coughed, a strangled sound, wheeling around in the lopsided desk chair to stare wildly at her. Woeburne blinked another time. Lefevre skittered out from her spotless counter to flag down a car. The ribbon went fluttering in that hot gust of wind through the cracked door.

"Yes? Yes, I am." A wince passed through her, swollen nose to olive eyes. The lady looked like she'd recently been in a fight. But the expression was irritation, not fear, like she had better things to do. LaCroix was already en route to the elevators at a fast clip. "Wait," she told Bernie, the same thing someone more important just told her. "Whatever it is. Wait right there."

"OK," he told her back, because what else?

"Sir. Thank you," Woeburne called Mr. LaCroix, then, weak accent sagging awkwardly in the resonance of this lobby, vacant at midnight, much too tall. "It's appreciated. As was everything. Is everything. Thank you for that. I'll be in tomorrow. I'll manage the job."

Mr. LaCroix brushed her gratitude away, poking a dismissive wave through the automated doors. He did not stop or turn around again. You could only glimpse his hand inside its neat, pressed sleeve.

"Good-night!" she tried, but the lift cut her off.

Chunk was flabbergasted. One large hand pawed shredded cheese off his desk while the other fumbled for a cellular phone. He must've seen this same woman walk by Joelle's post at least a dozen times in the past month, but never bothered to learn her name. Press people and representatives from Such-and-Such, Inc. came flittering in and out of Mr. LaCroix's life weekly, hawk-profiled and moving with a classist, big cat stalk. Woeburne wasn't much different—made of unsmiles, goth-kid lipstick, seamed stockings and bad-tempered shoes. It was an ordinary appearance around this place. She looked like a cross between a marketing ball-buster and a porno librarian. Not that a watchdog on-call would be caught dead watching pornography.

Pieces whirled into place. Sure she was. He should've inferred it was too convenient to be a coincidence, shouldn't have needed a third-party appeal to detect a dangerous person. The woman in front of him, fast-talking new arrival, was all rocky corners because her _actual_ job had little to do with number-crunching. The clues were all there: stout English, somber clothing, aloof, prickly demeanor. Some kind of twist on a Bond black-and-white. Lily confirmed it, but the signs glared at him now. She screamed spy. Maybe investigating Corporate America for bank frauds or long-forgotten records of communist funding. Maybe she was here to protect or shadow Mr. LaCroix. Bernie wondered if Mr. LaCroix knew, but wouldn't jeopardize the mission by asking such a barefaced question. Her identity might have already been compromised.

More importantly: what do you imagine was in that sleek black portfolio bag? You'd think it was full of paper, from the way she was holding it, but could just as easily be slinging an automatic.

Bernie tugged at the snaps on his collar. This was probably not even the first time he'd had a spy pass his desk.

"Hold on," he asked, flipping open his cell. She'd forgotten about him. Woeburne stopped three feet from Venture's exit to slice him with a sub-zero look. "Hang on a minute there, ma'am. Sorry to detain you, but this is important. Kid around here—Lily Harris—says you're missing persons. She's been looking for you. Since I found you—" That bottle-green stare dropped in temperature. There was a single bony pea on her bridge, as though it had been knocked awry weeks ago, trying to heal itself smooth. Chunk corrected himself. "Now that you're here, I mean. You really ought to give the girl a call. If that's OK with you. It being, uh, technically none of my business, after all."

"Correct," she granted, leaving Bernie no room to recover. He was oddly put-off. " _Absolutely_ none of your business. Put that phone down. Anyway, I've already spoken to her. You know what about this, exactly?"

"Don't worry, ma'am," Chunk promised, clapping the hinge shut. He tucked it back into his button-down. "Miss Harris was real discreet. She told me everything was just on a need-to-know basis. And I sure didn't pry. Because, you know." The man flashed her an unspoken, important look. Sparse eyebrows curved inches from his glossy crown. " _Your_ line of work."

Ms. Woeburne stared hard without quite making eye contact, as one might to a man speaking in tongues.

"I see," she said narrowly. Bernie nodded.

"No trouble, ma'am. I'll keep my nose clean. These matters can get very sticky, I understand. We've been briefed on protocol for things like this. Just wanted to let you know you've got someone out here watching your back."

"Right," she snapped. Then there was a car horn, a call from Ms. Joelle, and their five-minute secret meeting had come to a close. Bernie watched Woeburne turn around—a skewed, distasteful look tacked to her face—and push through those black double-doors.

"Be safe!" Chunk hollered after her, waving a happy arm. "I mean, have a good night."

Ms. Woeburne would never understand why, every shift from then on out, Officer Krantz always seemed to toss her a special little wink.


	26. Bizarre Circumstances

_For S.W._

Good evening. Your next assignment is detailed below.

As a first order of business: I believe this particular arrangement would benefit from some history. You know I am not typically one for moseying around the point, but I suspect you may greet the mission before you with a measure of healthy skepticism. I, of course, would expect nothing less.

As you are no doubt already aware, before we became acquainted, I’d significant capital invested in South Africa, and made more than significant earnings there. A hefty amount of this period I spent in the Johannesburg area. (Which was, at that time, close to wilderness as I would ever wish upon you. But that’s neither here nor there.)  I mention this to impress the point that I’ve encountered, albeit indirectly, individuals like the individual involved here, and I’ve participated (albeit irregularly) in business like the business I am about to put before you.

Back to the Nagaraja, then. Ms. Pisha—that is her name—has traced to Los Angeles a Zulu artifact she would very much like to acquire as part of an ongoing research project. Unfortunately, the local political climate prevents her from maneuvering freely, not to mention her obvious condition. It follows that someone less conspicuous will have to maneuver in her stead. In trade, she offers information of great interest to our endeavors in California—and to me, personally.

The piece is currently held by an anthropologist living in Santa Monica—one of Isaac Abram’s ghouls. (Publication history and curriculum vitae are attached.) Given his attachments, I would need someone diplomatic and subtle to liberate it without stirring the hive. Moreover: I need someone I know I can trust.

I won’t try to convince you that this isn’t a mildly bizarre set of circumstances. That said, you are strongly encouraged to rethink your natural and understandable resistance. Naturally, we (and I) officially reject all pagan religiosity and iconotry as fictive. However, what I do know is that the superstitions of kine—primitive as they may be—are every so often a result of legitimate supernatural activity. While we grant them no credence, we ought not always dismiss them. At least, not without investigation where it is warranted.

It is warranted. You needn’t concern yourself with investigating the piece; that is Ms. Pisha’s area of expertise. I merely need you to acquire it with due care.

In light of your recent difficulties, I wouldn't impose so soon, but this does need prompt attention. And—it goes without saying—your singular discretion. Thank you in advance.

Direct necessary questions to my private server. I hope you are well.

Regards,

 

SL

P.S. Joelle has profiled five high-ranking Foundation security agents for your review. Dossiers attached. You are welcome to select three for your personal needs.


	27. The Ivory Tower

Ms. Woeburne, frankly, couldn't say the operation was genius.

For the past forty-five minutes, she'd been distractedly thumbing her way through California State's library, a place the Ventrue all but waltzed into, not so much as a security guard or locked door to dissuade her. She'd lodged a shamelessly plagiarized anthropology dissertation under one arm and stack of topical books under the other. The coffee-stain on her blouse had been put there purposely, and the unhealthy shades of her face had been rewritten by an obscene amount of blush. It made the mildly resentful vampire look as grad-school girlish as she possible could for a body some seventy years old. Even her glasses, freshly replaced, had been tucked into a head of dark, disheveled hair. _Human enough_ , S.W. said in the pocket mirror—it was human enough—accidentally sexy, academically harried, officially grown-up.

Which was funny, really, because that's just what she'd been when she died.

It grated Ms. Woeburne to slip on this caricature of her past life, but, as always, there was a method here at work. She was not very practiced at this fieldwork sort of thing. Her acting skills had never been stellar, but a Ventrue should know how to sell. Besides: no one deserving the title _Patrician_ fails at hoodwinking some Toreador's ghoul.

Ms. Woeburne read about Ernest Wilhelm. He specialized in modern pre-industrial cultures; his last twenty-or-so years had been busy; he'd delivered a smattering of presentations nationwide, cashed a few grants, flickered to and fro between visiting professorships. The Nagaraja's relics came into his possession during a recent Côte d'Ivoire sabbatical. Poor Ernest had no idea what sights he'd stumbled into by picking up those totems. On the subject of "Poor Ernest," S.W. doubted Baron Abrams did, either—he'd likely acquired this traveling doctor as a conversation piece for his parlor shelf, much as the doctor in turn collected ominous blackwood dolls.

Professor Wilhelm was no wheeling-dealing recon officer, anyway. He was moderately moneyed, nearly as old as she was, and tossing around the idea of writing another largely ignored book on the hunter/gatherer peoples of West Africa.

Ms. Woeburne wished she'd known ahead of time that Professor Wilhelm also happened to be a graying old pervert.

As it was, the Ventrue realized she'd yawned through all that research for nothing. This scientist's scrutiny was nowhere near his fraud student's forged thesis; instead, it'd been fixed for the past fifteen minutes directly down the shallow opening of her shirt. Which made finagling information out of him incredibly easy. Unfortunately, it also made not slapping the unshaven prat in his slobbery mouth difficult. She was inquiring about useful footnotes to substantiate her phony paper whilst Dr. Wilhelm was obviously forming a hypothesis about Ms. Woeburne's cup size.

"—to correct me if I'm wrong about that. At the very least I thought I'd sketch a few illustrations to accompany the text. But the museum put a twenty-page waitlist on my lap! Told me to try back. I don't have that kind of leverage. At this point, professor, I think what I could really use is some—" Citrus lit the back of her tongue. Mr. LaCroix had better honor the depths to which she sank for this one. Men love double-entendres. "—hands-on experience," she finished, dismally.

"That's common," he reassured her—contrite, blustery, pleased to be spreading the knowledge of waitlists and forms. His left palm sat on the widest point of his breastbone; the other tapped their table space. There was not, mind you, much. She felt the vibrations in her elbows and forced out a dry, crinkling grin. "Don't take it personally. It's common practice, I promise you."

"I figured it was. Too easy if the curators worked with us. It's just: I don't suppose you might know someone else I could—? Oh. Please—" The vampire manufactured a blush by covering her nose with one abashed hand. There was a wince beneath. She tittered inanely, hating him. "I sound like a sophomore. Forget I asked—how cheeky. I'd never impose."

"No, no—that's all right. It's quite all right. I'm glad you spoke up. We need women who speak up in this field, my dear," he averred, reaching out like a true-blue mentor and patting her forearm with his hand. How noble! Ernest had managed to rip his stare from her cleavage and reinstate it somewhere nearby Ms. Woeburne's face. S.W. considered picking up one of the tomes beside her and sailing its spine into that lopsided grin of chemically white teeth. "It's a young science; no room for dormice. There's nothing wrong with a little imposition for the sake of research. I could, actually, make a call or two for you." Wilhelm gloated with this small power. He had a receding fork of blond hair that had worn itself musty, gone orange at the root. "But nevermind that for a moment. I'm about to make your day, Miss… Scott, was it?"

"It was," the Foreman shot back, her crunched-paper grin, its trademark sting. Anna Scott—an easy name to remember. She'd stolen it from an affectionate housemistress with watery eyes that made the young, standoffish Junior-Miss Woeburne uncomfortable. Funny to remember some kindly, tender-voiced duenna now.

"Well, Miss Scott. Prepare yourself. Here's a piece of kismet: I've just added a shipment of fetishes like the ones you're describing to my private collection. Now, I _could_ dial up the curator and ask her to bump you up their line. But you still wouldn't be able to study the items as thoroughly as I'm sure you'd like. Far better, I'd think, to just drop by my home on a free evening. I'll be happy to let you poke and prod to your heart's content." He had already begun to write down his address and telephone number on a stray post-it. Age-speckled hands manipulated the ballpoint pen with practiced, heartbreaker ease.

"Dr. Wilhelm, I couldn't inconvenience you like that. Impossible. You must be so busy," Woeburne gushed. She fantasized about driving her shoe heel into the man's big toe. "With the new book, and whatnot."

"Nonsense. There's nothing more important to me than the cultivation of young minds." (S.W. was sure.) "Perhaps you could drop by Saturday."

Three days of reading on a sofa, twiddling her thumbs? "I wish I could, but… I'm sorry, this is so embarrassing." She faked another ridiculous blush. "I've got a bit of surgery scheduled this weekend. Wisdom teeth. They're nasty ones. I'm afraid I'll be laid up all through next week." Wrinkling old bastard would like that excuse, she guessed; it set Anna Scott in her twenties. "Is there any way you might be able to squeeze me in? Thursday? If that works with you, of course. It's all right if it doesn't. I wouldn't badger. You have a hundred more important things to do."

"Thursday's no good," Wilhelm answered, furrowing with disappointment. Ms. Woeburne guessed the wife would probably be in—either that, or another eager schoolgirl. "Tell you what: why don't you just drop by tonight? I'll be heading home right after I finish up here. You can accompany me, if you'd like."

"Yes. That would be perfect," she lied through her gritting teeth.

The cab ride was uneventful—but only because Ms. Woeburne wouldn't classify some withering professor's awkward attempts to slide his palm up her knee an 'event.'

Here's a sad lesson to learn, cadets. This is the way of espionage sometimes. It cannot always be glamor and gunfire. There are nights it is geriatrics and gin.

They were on their way now. Bleak turn of phrase—metaphorically and literally. It was fortunate, Ms. Woeburne reminded herself, shrugging her good-soldier best, dead skin not feeling much of the thumb flicking the hip of her underthings. It was really a nice disguise. There's no need to phone one's Baron about visits from undisruptive, pasty little girls, after all; Camarilla inquiries are something altogether different. S.W. couldn't know how supernaturally informed Ernest Wilhelm was, but Mr. LaCroix had been awfully clear: she was not to provide Isaac with more political ammunition, no matter the cost, Nagaraja ambitions be damned. And the Ventrue was fairly secure in her ability to Dominate some lecherous ghoul. If she could just manage to slip in and out—what an innuendo—of this townhouse without revealing her seams, then it was all peaches. It was going to be fine.

And it was certainly doable, given her host's apparent disposition—not to mention his fingertips, which were currently drawing letters on S.W.'s outer thigh. He spelled out her name: A-N-N-A, how excruciating. Decades ago, the actual, living Ms. Woeburne had kissed frat-boys whose suggestions were less heavy-handed. She bit down her molars to make the grin. She did not really bother repaying him the seduction. That is the good thing about men who believe they are better than you: they are far less interested about what you do with them as they are infatuated with what they'll maybe do to you.

Much as she would've enjoyed cracking an elbow into his nose, smarter by far to ruffle her dark hair and twinkle occasional low-lidded looks. The burn of her mostly-healed nose didn't get in the way. Ms. Woeburne had spent an inordinate amount of time hunched before the bathroom mirror last night—pinching, wrinkling, and twitching the bridge of her snout until it could sneak up and sting no more.

No doubt Ernest would call the police when a handful of precious artifacts vanished from his home. In that endeavor, all Ms. Woeburne could gift him was: _'Good luck hunting down Anna Scott.'_

She hoped the Prince didn't expect her to trot up and shake their client's hand in-person, though. Granted, she'd never met a bona fide Nagaraja, but this demonology business made her Ventrue fine hairs tippy-toe. Mr. LaCroix ate things occult with knife-and-fork these last few years—probably just for the sake of spitting them back out again, suspicions dismissed. Waste of a hobby, if you asked his bailiff (no one did). But at least it was easy to accommodate.

Do you know what is harder than artifacts and philanderers? World Wars, parliaments, Anarch knives.

Professor Wilhelm's residence turned out to be a rather impressive redbrick townhome. The architecture was snug, vertical, and three stories high in luxe earthy tones. Amber paneling mixed with terra cotta. Inside, a soldierly file of small-paned windows opened the ivy-paper walls. Adornments boasted about at every bare angle: framed awards, enlarged photographs of Sahara safaris, a multitude of painted sculptures tasseled with goatshair. Display cabinets crowded the walls. And over each room lingered a stagnant textbook scent that could not quite be defined—a perfume of travel, musk, leather antiques. Someone had hanged a snapping turtle shell over the mantle; it was conical and dark-glass green. All in all, a stuffy house, a cocksure one, a wandering scholar's bachelor pad.

Ernest tossed his keys onto a foyer end-table and made a gentlemanly show of taking Ms. Woeburne's jacket. "Well, here we are. Please get comfortable. Kick up your heels in the den and help yourself to a drink from the kitchen, if you'd like; there should be a decent merlot open. Have a breadstick."

"A breadstick," Woeburne said. She was not sure she had heard correctly.

"They're in the basket. Italian seasoning. I'll go bring a few items up from the basement. Then we can sit and talk to each other."

 _Right_.

Ernest vanished down a nearby stairwell, and S.W. began her business—the business, that is, of professional snooping.

It wasn't as though she expected to bag a statue up here; the relevant items were obviously with his downstairs assembly, and would require a diversion. Nevertheless, it behooves wise Kindred to investigate their surroundings. Perhaps Dr. Wilhelm kept some intriguing tidbits in his desk drawers; maybe he tucked compromising information in those overstocked bookshelves. Ms. Woeburne checked between the Gideon Bible and a deadly hardcover copy of Ovid's _Metamorphoses_. She upturned nothing but two palmfuls of dust.

Next came the furniture. S.W. ran her hands quickly beneath the cushion folds of two reclining chairs and a crosshatched teal couch. They coughed lint and spare change, neither of which the Ventrue had interest in keeping. Ms. Woeburne wasn't sure what she thought to stumble upon. The totems are not usually secreted inside pillowcases, and she didn't exactly expect to procure a pistol. Professor Wilhelm didn't seem dangerous. But it never hurts to be absolutely sure. Ms. Woeburne always wants to be sure.

She had just rifled through a drawer of receipts in the dining hall when Ernest returned, tie limp around his neck, three buttons missing on the man's striped shirt.

_Oh, hell._

A grin so mechanized and so unmeant filed across Anna Scott's lips that the whites of her teeth might've been bowling pins, put there by robotics, straightened up by the bar. Professor Wilhelm, ramshackle Casanova, smoothed a fork of sallow blond and issued his most debonair smile. The man was all gumline and pine tree cologne. Before sidewinding up, he paused only a moment—one moment to set aside the heavy trunk that was tucked under one arm. Its contents clinked on the large dinner table. S.W. knew her prize lay inside, and saw the key already stuck inside the heavy, decorative lock. Only a single obstacle remained between Camarilla officer and prime objective. Pity it had to be such a god-awful obstacle. _'Oh, he had better appreciate this…'_

Ms. Woeburne, feeling in no way nubile or vixen-like, dropped her left hip and simpered. She barely entered arm's reach before Ernest flattened a palm against her Ventrue derriere and brought the rest stumbling against his chest. Her nails looked very distinctly purple against the tangled undergrowth of chest hair. She was overpowered by a locker-room scent of aftershave and peppery shampoo.

Somehow—somehow—Ms. Woeburne didn't jab for the throat. Her cringe twisted where he couldn't see it. It left pink lipstick smeared across his rumpled collar.

"You know," the Anna said, English tapering until it was not a disciplinarian sting but a tease. Her jaws tightened. Both forearms draped themselves around Wilhelm's shoulders as he fumbled with the practical mechanics of navigating beneath her blouse. "I really should make a plan. I ought to take a look at those pieces first. And maybe, in the meantime, _you_ could take a look at my draft."

There was a look of irritated disbelief his stare. "Now?" he pleaded, brow dented, cupped hands retracting from the woman's body, which had since gone stiff. Ernest seemed to have a sense of being bribed, of a transaction being made. She imagined he had practice.

"Work before pleasure," S.W. chided, waggled one finger, and watched Professor Wilhelm heave a theatrical sigh. With nothing else to say, he resentfully snatched her neat paper stack off the nearby table, proceeding to lunk back into his living room. The man moved like a foiled Igor. Just around the corner, there were sofa springs; he flopped wearily into the same furniture she'd just weapons-checked. It was a little play-acted tantrum. She waited several minutes to be assured he'd settled himself into the dissertation—standing still, patient, ears tweaked for reading sounds. They were forthcoming. There was an annoyed, sulking note to each papery turn.

Marvelous.

She tucked her shirt back in, clicked open the battered trunk, and peered into blackness.

It was a good forty pounds of art, she estimated—a great deal more than the Nagaraja requested, and most of it too angular to simply skirt under her compromised top. There would be no smuggling them all out unless she intended on a ruckus. (She did not intend on a ruckus.) While Woeburne was still a relatively unknown entity in Los Angeles, she'd garnered a negative sort of attention, the sort enemies watch with suspicious eyes. And _Rosebud Flush_ is not exactly the high art of Masquerade. Being identified through rough description might be enough to trouble Prince LaCroix—and "troubling" one's Prince is just about the surest route to decreased standards of living. Or simply _no_ standard of living, at all.

Not worth it one littlest bit. They were not even attractive sculptures—not even something you could prop on your alcove and admire.

S.W. considered the pieces carefully. She gently removed each item and arranged them across the dustless redwood tabletop, eliminating those that did not meet her employer's description. Soldier-men, he'd said; tiny people, rifles in miniature. It was disturbing to hunt for an image so easily applied to yourself. She cast aside four animal carvings, a bubble-wrapped mask, and what appeared to be some sort of decorative cudgel before success arrived in the form of thin, eyeless spearman made from charred bark. It was strangely heavy for such a petite size.

No eyes, no. These soldiers were a horrible, ugly, terrified grimace ripped into the small black face.

Bizarre circumstances, she mouthed. Damage control.

Rooting through the box yielded three of them in total. They were oddly cool against her fingertips, bone-brittle, and gave Ms. Woeburne a serious case of The Creeps.

The Foreman grimaced herself and quickly scooped the packing peanuts she'd spilled. S.W. wondered, stuffing each totem into her over-packed purse, if Ernest would much miss these particulars of his treasure trove. Perhaps he'd not notice. It was equally possible he'd throw a scandalized fit to the larceny department, unable to finish his newest book without them. Woeburne allowed herself to feel a little pleased by that, listening as dramatic margin comment scribbling leaked in from Wilhelm's den.

How often does one get an unpunishable stab at a magnificent sleaze? He reminded her vaguely of the father of some pretty young man she'd once wasted time with—a tanned, bowtied father who'd met her at a brunch, taken one look, then harrumphed a passing grade and ignored the rest. He was an investment banker of a miniscule world. She was just a squirt of a thing, maybe twenty. Strange to recall him and not his son (whose name she can't remember). But it had been a very long time since Ms. Woeburne felt so offended, and it was a very long time until she felt so offended again.

What had happened, you ask, to the pretty young man? Oh, something, probably. Someone, to be sure. She had tired of him and stopped answering his letters. She grew disinterested with his way of talking and his body and his terribly forced, terribly cute notions of propriety. It was enough of a glimpse to satisfy. A glimpse, a sample; she didn't really care to know many young men much better than that.

And she didn't really care to know anything more of these idols, these blind soldier-men who looked and locked in such a familiar way.

Ms. Woeburne wrestled with the zipper, broke her purse, then decided to forsake this whole con artist routine and just climb out a damn window.

The Ventrue peeked quietly around the dining room threshold. Poor duped Wilhelm was still proofreading away, grumpily unaware, palm heel reddening his pouting chin. He'd stay there for maybe fifteen minutes before impatience got the best of him. More than enough. She called in _"Mind if I open a window?"_ just to be safe. He gave a passing harrumph that could have fallen straight from that meaningless slice of her memory.

That settles that.

She turned around and chose a relatively harmless-looking bay, one that opened into soft darkness rather than security lights or noisy cement. There were three hideous squeaks when S.W. unlatched and pushed it. Not enough to disturb her host.

Deeming her first catburglary a triumph, Woeburne slid one leg outside, then the other. She double-checked the height and the landing pad one final time. And, with an indulgent harrumph of her own, the Foreman dropped, unheard, to the wet backyard grass.

She didn't alert anyone. She didn't sprain anything. She didn't even dirty her khakis.

Quite pleased with having acquired her quarry and evaded a tabletop tryst with Dr. Wilhelm, Ms. Woeburne dusted, stepped over a lovely daffodil bunch, and was off down the city sidewalk again.


	28. Re: Shuffle

**TO: CLAUDIA FAIRHOLM**  
**FROM: ROZALIN GREENE**  
**DATE: APRIL 3, 2010 9:15 PM**  
**SUBJECT: SHUFFLEBOARD TIME**

Claudia, my dear.

 

Take my advice to you as your old and older friend: Forget whatever hearsay you get about the Nosferatu. I’m a little unimpressed Isaac would actually bother you about this. Every Nosferatu cell I’ve worked with in my history with the Camarilla has pulled a twenty-year vanishing act now-and-again. And you’ll never find them, so it doesn’t matter. The Nosferatu are going to do whatever the Nosferatu are going to do. That goes double for Gary. He’s always been a tit.

Better not ask about the Voermans. Therese is tiring me out. She thinks she’s going to be a Prince or a Primogen—as though those are the only two options she might end up with.

I’m guessing you know your little friend Rama Linville turned up. Didn’t turn up, to be pointed about it. I went ahead and put a girl of mine on watch in Anaheim for you; she wrote in last night. He didn’t make it beyond the border. At the risk of telling you what you already know, dear: Scourge must’ve cleaned him out. They won’t _say_ that, of course. No—they’ll be keeping this one on hush, if I know the Ventrue around these parts. And I do claim to know them. As much as you can know the Ventrue, that is. I’m vaguely surprised he lasted as long as he did. Your people have something to do with that?

Here’s hoping you don’t take this one too hard, Claudicat. I know how hard you go in for witty boys in black ties. If he had half a wit in his head, he’d have known as soon as that Brit flew in his goose was cooked.

Which means the new holes in their Board need sealing. It’s starting to look like we’re stuck with Little-Croix for good. Which is funny. I guess this means I’ll have to learn her name.

Funnier: I could have sworn last month they were talking like she died.

The only real question left now is how it’s long going to take for the Scepters to lock-in their new line-up. Want to make it a bet? I say we’re looking at a new Board to contend with before summer’s out. New Board, new motions, new papers shoved our way. Can’t wait, I’m sure.

It was a joke. The subjectline. Shuffleboard. Shuffle the Board? You get it.

I’m trying.

 

Rozalin

 

P.S. (And I never write P.S.): What’s Max up to? There’s been a grim little spellslinger knocking at my door three nights this week, asking if I’ve had any odd requests from the Prince. He dropped vague references to an unlicensed investigation open by something called the Antiquities Department—which is nothing I’ve heard of. Left me the Regent’s private number and told me to _call-if_. 

Please. When does LaCroix request anything from me?


	29. Where the Sharks Hunt

Nobody notices sidewalk.

I mean, why would you? Nobody looks down at their feet that much. If you did, though, find a reason—the first thing you'd probably notice was heat. Not egg-pan scorching, not a cook-the-skin-off-your-knees broil, but a definite sense of California. It wasn't very well-kept, as sidewalks go, bits chipping off and filling with mud. But when the weather is at its most oppressive, this sidewalk can be OK.

You'd be surprised what you notice about sidewalk while your face is smashed into it.

"Let's blind this bitch," the Sabbat spat, and then there was a cowboy boot pressed into the back of her skull. "Rip out its eyes, dump it in the woods. Piece of shit. Waste of blood."

This is how Lily came to—sidewalk—and this is how she remembered, again, she was about to die.

The concrete pressed all its imperfections against hers. It didn't mean her any harm. She tried to push away, to give them both room. But the cowboy boot stepped down, matting her orange hair into a dry-blood brown, grinding one of Lily's cheeks back into the sidewalk. She didn't like arguing. She let both arms go to dough again so that the hurting everywhere would stop.

The shoe belonged to a he, and he did not want her to look up at him. She didn't want to, either. The face about to kill her: there was a dark, lupine mane; a lazy mouth, like a water bag; a urine-yellow glare. The pupils might have been red.

"It moved. Stomp it," a man with him said. She did not know what they were. She did not know if there were two or three.

The boot behind her head gouged itself into Lily's ribs. The yelp that came out sounded like a hurt dog; there was no chance of making that noise into words. She groped for both sides and left bloodprints there. Instinct sucked every limb tightly inward towards her center; artificial light swirled in the alleyway over her head.

It was a shortcut, Lily thought. If you wheeled back a couple minutes, subtracted the two-or-three men, it was really a shortcut that killed her.

When you're looking down the telescope of hindsight, it's easy to say things like this—things like _it was a shortcut that killed me_. Lily couldn't believe she would do that. She was not a person who hurried so much, and thought so little. She was not someone who stepped into places where things like this happened.

Ms. Woeburne warned her to never be caught alone in a ditch after dark. _"I'm sure you_ feel _stronger, but don't let it go to your head,"_ she'd tut, not quite bothering to glance away from her papers. _"You're not as unkillable as you'd like to believe. You are a small fish, and small fishes oughtn't swim where the sharks hunt."_

Generally Ms. Woeburne was too preoccupied for talks like that. Advice from her was a rare treat, but Lily listened; she was desperate to learn. But she'd been running late tonight—yes, running late for Empire Hotel. She'd forgotten her cell on the bedside table, couldn't find a payphone, and felt obligated not to make the sour-faced clerk who gave out absentminded tips and threadbare advice worry. She wouldn't have ended up here otherwise. She wasn't a dumb girl. She wasn't a fool.

 _"Well, I won't lie. I won't say that life will be easy for you,"_ Ms. Woeburne put it, a curt response to a question she found silly, a twitch at the tip of her nose. It was a little convex and admirably strong. It tickled a bit when the Ventrue said something she resented having to say. It was as fitted as a nose could be for the staunch, unsmiling face it fit. But Lily could still see, under the eddies of her brain, that snap blooming gross purple all across the purebred bridge. _"You can't control all variables. That in mind, it's quite possible for you to survive, so long as you're smart about how you do it and with whom. We all should err on the side of caution. So be fearful, yes, by all means do—but not so fearful that you do something foolish and get yourself killed."_

' _I can't believe this is how I'm going to die,'_ some part of Lily swished distantly. It wasn't the worst way to die, or anything. There were definitely more horrible ways. It was more unexpected than anything else. Imagining your funeral is easy, but imagining your death is hard. You don't really picture yourself being killed. Maybe in passing, but not as a real part of your life, she thought; not as a real possibility; not as something solid, tangible, concrete. Not being murdered.

"Murder" probably wasn't the right word.

"Exterminate" – that's the one.

When a swimmer is drowning, it's not like the movies. She doesn't flail and scream herself hoarse. There isn't a splashing havoc. Instead, it's a quiet—a deadly quiet—as water floods the lungs, siphoning energy from everything else. The dying body is a master of by-the-second priority. _Keep breathing_ , adrenaline drums as the death rushes in. Lily kept breathing. She needn't, really, but had stopped shouting minutes ago, when one more instant of life began to outweigh any other thing. All the walls of herself tilted in. She was just going to die. She was going to slip quietly beneath a wave when the last kick was kicked and her chest couldn't fill itself up anymore.

Lily supposed the last concern—as her shoulder popped in the socket and someone's heel went _crunch—_ the most real concern—was the Childe she'd made. She saw his face through the alternation of deadness and pain. How was E going to manage this? _'Will he even know I died? I hope he doesn't wonder about it for years. I hope whoever tells him does it gently. I hope he finds Ms. Woeburne. She could help him, make sure he does better than I did…'_

A southwestern toe slammed into her stomach and scattered everything. A streetlight halted her. Her middle wrapped around the pole like a horseshoe. Fingers—a hand that turned out to be Lily's—reached up to touch her face and came away bloody. There was a cut in her forehead, just under the hairline, shriveling everything, turning it red. She mindlessly tongued for missing teeth.

"—has had enough of this shit on my patrol. Bitch Prince doesn't tolerate it; I sure as fuck am not going to. I want it stuck up on the pier, somewhere those sympathizer fucks will see it. I want it done with." The leader had been speaking, his breath thick, his foot again on the scruff of her too-red red hair. She was unable to pull away without tearing scalp. And because the thin-blood could not turn her head, she had to look, to see. Lily saw the scars lanced deep into his face, weeded with stubble; she saw disgust in the dense, loping posture of his body; the vermeil eyes squinted beneath a greasy copper shutter of mane. There was so little recognizable about it.

"Stop squirming. Stop fucking crying," he snapped when she tried. Her eyes blinked hard. Open, close. Her jaw was sore and her hands were afraid to move.

"Take her somewhere, then. Can't do that here. It'll bleed out." Another man said so, casual as a lab dissection, outside her line of sight. Sediment was packed beneath each of Lily's nails. They shook where she'd put them, palms-down, pathetic stubs of claw. Her Beast was a runt and scratched uselessly across the sidewalk. It wasn't so hot; it felt strangely, mercifully cool.

"Then it bleeds out. I'm getting the teeth."

Lily didn't think she'd cried—didn't think she squirmed or hollered—but he'd said it, and she heard it, and then the heel behind her skull moved.

It landed neatly on the tremble of her left hand. She had to look.

"I just told your dumb ass not to move," he snarled, but now the thin-blood really was screaming. Her spine shot straight and the sight of that metal boot edge slicing into the large veins behind her knuckles found horror again, sudden and fresh, a last burst of energy before seawater took her under. "Who the fuck do you think you are? Piss into our territory, like you got some kind of leave to feed here? You got no right to cry to me. Shut the fuck up!"

The iron tip of the boot lifted again. It mashed Lily's solar plexus, flattening everything out. There was a burn—yellow this time, like mold on formica, like drinking honey vodka and getting sick. She reflexively curled herself. She rolled away from the flickering lamppost to hug her abdomen, and that was reflex, too—but it was a bad choice. They grabbed and flipped the fledgling prone onto her back. It was not where she wanted to be—it was so far away from where she wanted to be—and the bulb overhead blinked out the faces there. She clawed and pealed and thrashed as messily as she could.

This seemed to provoke them when the screaming did not, and Lily watched with a sort of fishlike, bad-movie horror as the leader moved to kill her. A rubber sole, someone else's, stomped the thin-blood's wrist and held it; her failing legs dropped like lead, knees locking. Then another man had her tennis shoe, and she felt pastel pink slide off the foot, saw it ricochet off into a sewage grate. They pried apart and pinned her ankles so that she could not fight at all. She tried to bite something. The Gangrel straddled her waist on the asphalt and clamped her throat to hold her down.

"Gut it," someone said.

"Take out its ribs."

Lily's neck in one fist and nothing in the other, he pulled a pocket knife from his coat, flipping it open. Rotting leather and rust. Steel whipped across the neonate's cheek when she twisted away from it. The struggling annoyed them. That blade came for her a second time; it caught the crescent moon; it ripped through her cotton shirt from bottom-to-top, sending buttons plinking away. She was a frog crucified to a cutting board. They were going to pull her apart. _Pull her apart!_ They were going to divide her story into quarters. They were going to take her to pieces like birds with soft bread. She saw the polka-dotted center of her bra snap, centimeters from the sternum. They were going to pop open the cavity, destroy her heart, strip out the contents of her chest. Lily could feel the cruor foaming up in her mouth, a deep, intestinal taste. She could feel how disembowelment might be. The Sabbat pressed her temple against the asphalt and prepared to dig that point into the pale line of gums; right above the cuspid; right where, in third grade gym class, she'd fallen off a rain-slick beam and hit it on the monkeybars, and it bled. It bled everywhere. She thought it would keep bleeding for—

Something exploded against his right shoulder, sending blood in the air like a gunshot.

It was a gunshot.

And further down the alley behind them was a gun, one black pupil trenched in a metal eye.

"Missed," it chuffed.

It was not sporting. It was easy, an east Missouri brogue; it sounded a little bit hostile; it didn't miss.

The Sabbat had fallen. He hurled forward, body over her, no longer in an ominous way—the impact of that cartridge had hurt him. His face, lit up with bare fang, was much too close; Lily got a hideous glimpse of shoulder bone, right down to the dismal collapse of the bullet where it ground to a halt. She cringed and wished there was somewhere else to go but beneath this shot man.

Lily wasn't sure what she was doing—but her hand was up, then open—then jammed on that face, panting over hers—and then she pushed it. She pushed half of herself out from beneath him, corkscrewing to one side. Her bare foot gained traction on the sting of hot ground and slid the rest of her away. The Sabbat didn't scrabble for his kill this time. His paw left her and his knife clinked the blacktop as the large frame tumbled, thumped aside; then he was actually on his side; then she was suddenly free, no one above her; there was nothing but a cold April moon.

The others reached for handguns, but no one moved. She kicked a few more leg-lengths away from them, scrambling backwards with toes and palm heels, sitting blearily on the street. Shot-out blood cooled on Lily's broad forehead, sticking on her lids, lashes, collarbone. Three pairs of wolf-eyes went red with a sort of spiteful, frustrated desire. She did not really see them. She looked up and stared at the gun.

The shot one grabbed for himself to staunch the blood flow. He struggled to stand. He made it to his knees.

"SON-OF-A-BITCH," the Gangrel frothed. He'd rolled off the curb, puffing and rasping, chops pared. His tangles, a confusion of brown and red, glimmered with blood. The scent of carrion and hide hanging about him was intensified by raw meat. "What the fuck. You shot me. You fucking shot me. What the—"

"Don't speak to me," the new voice cut in, rockface impatience. He was difficult to discern from her current angle; the contrast of dark hair and face under the failing lamplight made him harder to see, so Lily didn't really try; nothing needed to be clearer than that pistol. He paid her no mind. None of them did. It was as though he hadn't seen Lily, at all. "I didn't ask you to speak, shovelhead. You can answer one question. Why don't you tell me where the fuck you are right now?"

"Son-of-a-bitch. You shot me. It's not your business. I can't talk with my—" Insides slouching out, a chunk of himself taken off. The Sabbat fumbled for something to help him. He tried to look dangerous; those yellow eyes peeled to a squint. Air huffed uselessly through the little crooked spaces between his teeth. "This has got nothing to do with you, Rodriguez. It's none of your fucking—"

"I didn't ask for your opinion, you mangy motherfucker. I asked you where we are."

The pack stood silently, hesitant to fight, dogs in tall grass, fighters in their patchy jackets and ragged denim.

"Downtown," their leader said, finally.

"Downtown," Rodriguez agreed, and he talked over the shot man, like it was nothing. The gun was a sharp spur. The eyes that ran down the length of it, that wouldn't blink, were an unhealthy, fearfully bright blue, an unlikely color above the deadness of sockets beneath them. "You are downtown and so it is ALL my business. I warned you fuckers to stay off my streets once. Get up," he spat. They did. Lily, half-naked in darkness, wiped someone else's blood off her eyelids. Goosebumps pimpled across the thin-blood's skinny arms, the slopes of her back. She was having trouble making things make sense.

Standing released a fresh wash of red down the front of the Gangrel's shirt. You couldn't tell what it was supposed to look like now, sticking to his coat lapels, threads catching on the smash of skin. He moved slowly, but he growled. "This is _our_ business," it went, still feeling the authority, hanging on hard. His pipes were heavy with anemia, and with Alabama, and with the good-sized chunk of him that got blown off. "You've got no right. You've got no right to interfere. We aren't hunting your people. We aren't fucking with your claim. Ain't shit been done here tonight that hasn't already—"

"Shut up," Rodriguez said.

The Sabbat hoarked up a mouth of blood.

"Next time I kill somebody," Rodriguez said.

They simmered for a few minutes, unsure how to proceed. The eyelets on his combat boots distracted her. She could see his face now, but couldn't process the lines, didn't distinguish the guy from the gun. He was pretty underdressed for fight. He didn't look at her, not once.

"Get on your feet, child," Rodriguez said, and that was all.

And then she was a person again, something that could feel scared, an entity with a sense of self. Lily stood up from her sad square of pavement, one freckled forearm clasped reflexively over her breasts. The core of her was tight like fingers in a fist.

Standing made her feel tall, vulnerable, out-of-body. There was nowhere obvious to go, so she backpedaled behind him, looking wildly to the hounds across this street. Her mouth was loose and the tops of her long teeth looked confused. She should have run. She should have played her chances, spun on her only tennis shoe and sprinted down this alley, zig-zagging, relying on the brick buildings to protect her, not remembering that she is half of what they are, but thinking a _bullet will only hit a moving target one in twenty shots_.

But she didn't.

"You're shitting me." Their leader could see his own blood-spatter on Lily's moonish face. "This is fucking stupid. Nobody came here looking for trouble with you."

"Found it, though, didn't you."

"We'll go. We don't have to do this shit. But this is our bounty. It was not hunted in your territory. This is our right—" It was _rights_ again, and it seemed to her like everybody spoke this way. "It's my responsibility—"

"Better idea. You tuck your tail between your legs and get the fuck out of my sight before I call hunting season on every last one of you sons-of-bitches sleep in that crackhouse on Santa Fe."

It was a wildly offensive thing to say, because the Gangrel stood his ground. "You're going to _call_? What the fuck are _you_ going to call? That's a laugh. The Cam sure as fuck thinks so, too. Tell them the same thing? Tell the Prince and his gorilla to get off your yard? How's that working out for you?" he asked, a lower order of wolf, losing drops of itself on the dirt. "I guess we'll find out real soon. Hunting season; please. Let me do you up some math, Brujah. There's one of you. There's three of us. You're fucked, you understand? You can't do shit to us. We've got the odds. You don't get to make the rules."

So—vampires lie. There's really no way of knowing what they think. But the reaction the Sabbat got was probably not the one he was aiming for.

The Anarch showed his teeth, too. He laughed at them.

It wasn't really a funny, ha-ha laugh. It was just a choke, a flash of his whites at the stupid threat— _one of you, three of us!_ —but the sight flustered them. You had better be scary if you're going to be mean. You had better not let anybody laugh at you.

There was an awkward pause in which you could hear everyone not-breathe.

Then there was a blur of movement, Rodriguez's free hand leapt up from his hip, and two of them splattered on the concrete.

It was a big sound and a big fan of blood. One man had been shot through the eyeball; a round hit the other's throat. They both went flat. Nobody else got out a shot.

"Odds noted, you worthless fuck," Rodriguez said.

Nobody was left to hear it. Their leader had disappeared via a rickety fire escape. It clattered long after the body on it had gone.

If you've lost most of your fights, you better talk like you win.

Rodriguez walked over to the boy he'd shot in the neck. With no hesitation, he looked down, lifted a pistol, and put one more large bullet in his heart. It was one unhitched sound: _bang._ Chilling insouciance; dust in the air. There was no expression on the Brujah's face.

Then Lily was on hands-and-knees in a corner, retching up the contents of a stomach she didn't have much use for any more.

It was a wind-bitten alley, black gravel beneath her, cold street against the undersides of both palms. She tried to throw up the bag of blood from this morning, but her body had already sponged it. There was no way to differentiate the scent of vampire smoke from the old cigarettes on the ground. Lily's guts cramped badly; scarlet dried on her upper lip.

"Fucking shovelheads," Rodriguez observed from where he stood in the ashes of that dead boy. "You get killed?"

"I'm OK. I'm OK; I just—" But the nausea was too much; saliva rolled from her mouth without warning and hit the concrete. Lily clamped her jaw shut and breathed out miserably and pinned shut her lips with her wristbone. He was nowhere near her but she couldn't look up. "Don't touch me. Just let me—"

There was a dull bang as something jumped out of the trash can beside her. It was just somebody's cat. But it threw Lily right back into adrenaline. She flipped over and kicked away until the unwelcoming brick wall was against her bare back and there was nowhere else to go. She saw at the end of her leg the one damp, filthy ankle sock, hanging there like an amputated limb.

"What the fuck," Lily hollered. "Fuck! Holy shit. Oh, God. They were going to kill me." Suddenly it was the only thought she could have. The thin-blood clutched both legs to her bare torso, trying not to be sick again, too traumatized to feel the humiliation. And then came the shakes—just all of a sudden—spreading down her arms and into her hands, shoulders, jaw. Her nose bled into the knees of her jeans. The cut in Lily's cheekbone had started to scab. "What the fuck? I didn't do anything! They were going to cut my teeth out! They were going to open my stomach. Jesus. My ribs," she remembered. The coldness slashed her from belly to throat. Lily pulled at her hair, which was full of sand from the Sabbat's boot. She looked for any sign of her missing clothes. "I've got to go. I've just got to go. I've got to get out of here. Where did my... Oh, shit, he took my wallet. Where the fuck did it go? Who are you?"

"That's not the question I'd—"

"What do you want?" It came out like a shriek. She thrust out one hand and barked with the large teeth still in her head. He looked back at her mildly from next to that pile of dust. "What do you want from me? They stole everything I had! I just want to go. I want to go. Can't you people leave me the fuck alone!"

"Relax, child. You're a baby. I don't eat babies." Rodriguez looked calm, like it was all over, and when she tried to look at him again, Lily could only see he'd put the guns away.

"That's a fucked up thing to say," she told him, panted, leant to the side, and spat up whatever was left in her to lose.

She had to cough for a bit afterwards to clear out the tubes. It felt like pebbles stuck down there, wedged into the soft tissue of her lungs. Lily wiped her chin in the heel of a hand. It was comforting to breathe, somehow, so she kept at it, trying not to think about anybody else being here, head muggy with death hormones, trying to clear the cobwebs, exhaling and squeezing shut her eyes.

A long minute passed. Lily told herself it was OK to stop now, it was the same world it had been this morning, and she was not going to die.

"Are you still here?" the baby asked, not wanting to open them back up until she knew.

"Yes."

Lily chuffed out the rest of her air. "Shit."

She'd been listening for footsteps. The asphalt under her felt scruffy. There wasn't much adrenaline left; the panic dissolved, gradually, and she let it, until Lily could open her eyes and see like herself again.

"This really sucks," she told the vampire, because she didn't know what else to say.

Rodriguez was still there. He gave a shrug as a treaty, paired with a go-figure smile small enough that she could tell he didn't really mean it. It was a disturbing expression from where he still stood in that ashy blood. "You're not dead, anyway."

"Uh-huh," she agreed lamely, feeling wispy and weird. Without getting any closer—which was good, because Lily probably would've kicked at his kneecaps and bolted—he threw his jacket. It landed carelessly over the thin-blood's head. Embarrassment hadn't really come back to her yet, but oh yeah, she figured; it probably would be a good idea to put something on. The buttons were a distraction. She snuffed up some blood clots and got it closed. "They hit me a few times, is all. Ripped my stuff apart. I think the big one tore some of my hair out. But it's—" And there it was, before she knew it existed, or had the option to say _no_ : a single, tearless sob, more frustration than anything else. Her cheekbones seared with the friction of the asphalt. She did not think to thank him for the shirt. "This is awful. It's so fucked up. I was just going to work; that's it; that's all."

"Get up, kid. You got nothing to do here."

Lily didn't think she could just get up—just snap her fingers, make everything work right—but he took a step forward, and then she was on her feet—again— _get on your feet, child_ _—and she was_ scampering back.

"Wait. I get it. I get it, OK? STOP. Stop," Lily shrilled, trying to sound forceful with her palm heels shoved outward, knowing there was very little clearance between her back and the wall. "Don't get any closer to me. I'm sorry; I didn't know they were following me here. I didn't know I was trespassing. I don't know anything, I swear."

The man stopped where he was, and he lifted both hands, too. It was a strangely normal gesture—passive, like how you put the police at ease.

You shouldn't talk to the Brujah. Even she knew that. But right now, he wasn't Sabbat, and reminded her little of Ms. Woeburne, Rolf, or anyone else, really. He'd just picked a fight in an old shirt and some blue jeans, and had looked unafraid, completely unimpressed, like nothing could possibly happen to him. "Take a breath, kid. You look like shit."

"Who are you?" she asked again.

"Call me Nines."

Lily stung because her chest was full of air.

"So what happens now?" she wondered, not ready to trust anything yet.

"You explain a few things to me. I'm wondering what business a baby has hunting my side of town, four in the morning, looking like room service. You doing something here?"

Lily grimaced. She twisted inside a stranger's clothes. Her hands lowered, gradually, to rest near her thighs, but the fingers were splayed forcefully, and each knuckle hurt. "Work. I going to work—that's all," again, and it was the truth. Rodriguez's question sounded like it was not friendly curiosity, and she saw how his first interrogation ended. She did not like being called a baby. "I'm not hunting. I know I can't hunt territories. I wouldn't be out here at all. It's just my bus didn't show. Then I forgot my cell, and I couldn't find a payphone, so I... I guess I got turned around, and I was running short on time, and I…"

There wasn't much in the Brujah's look, but its quicksilver unsettled her. Lily felt tongue-tied. She tried to look as innocent and hopeless as she could.

" _Hmn_ ," he said.

"Look, I know what this sounds like, but I don't know what to tell you. I swear I wasn't hunting. It's just," she groped, growing angry with this clumsy case she was making for her life. There was a terrible taste in her throat, like dirty ore and vomit, as the last of the adrenaline pondered coming any further down. "It's just one of those days."

"I don't care where you hunt. But LA is not a safe place for you. These are the mean streets, child." Rodriguez tossed a nod toward the mounds of ash sifting thinly across the alleyway. There was a handgun at each of his sides and another in the jacket, in a sling. She suddenly felt very stupid and very unfit. "Keep that in mind next time you decide to detour down a dark alley downtown."

"I'll try," she agreed emptily, feeling chastised. "I'm still getting the hang of all this."

Then, thoughtless— "I'm Lily."—because what else did she have?

Nines looked a little harder. Lily didn't shrink back any more, but she kind of wanted to. "I've never seen you. You somebody's?"

"What?"

"Who. Who's your Sire, kid?"

"Nobody. I don't have one. I mean, I did. But he's—I don't know." (It seemed better than "he left me." _He left me_ made her fidget in those sleepless, dog-days mornings, where every stitch of this new body seemed to drag the old parts down.) "I'm not an illegal or anything. I'm not running around unaccounted for. Just I haven't been—you know. Like this—for very long. And I didn't mean to scream at you, but it feels like everyone is always trying to chase me off or hurt me or—"

There was just no reason to go down that road.

"Can I thank you somehow?" Lily tried instead. "I mean, shit. You didn't even hesitate. Those guys were serious; they could've shot you." Her arms weren't quite under control, and her voice, willowy and soft-touch, seemed dazed. "I'm like: what for, anyway? I don't know you, and you pulled me out of there."

He shrugged—looked blasé, and, since his question had been answered, a little bored with her. The lamplight was getting stale; it was hotter out than it felt like; the vampire was already focusing his attention elsewhere, like he was late to something, itching to get on and go. "I got to live here, child. When I see shit starting in my neighborhood, I end it."

"I don't care; you saved my ass. You're a fucking hero. I have to do something. Here. Here, I..." The fumbling stopped at her barren Capri pockets _._ "Shit. They took all my money."

Nines Rodriguez wasn't interested. "Where you live, kid?"

"North of here, on the east side. It's right by—"

"Come on if you want. I'll give you a ride."

You learn quickly, if you're a small thing like her, not to except anything from vampires. It's a lot less danger and disappointment if you get into the habit of thinking that way.

Lily screeched to a halt. She watched wide-eyed and vacillating as he turned around to head off, unsure if her legs were going to follow. There was a weird, suffocating dark yawning from these already dark bricks surrounding her. She couldn't lift her feet.

"Kid, I got things to do. You're coming with me, you better get on," Nines told her, and stopped at the far end of the alley, looking back. The streetlights blasted all his colors off standing there, in the open air of LA, staring back down this tunnel to the shadow where she hovered, static. A lot of people say that, after an almost-death, they see their whole lives flash out in the pits of their eyes. Lily did not really see much of hers. But she had looked forward to the Brujah at that distant end of road—lit like a piece of metal, larger body, eyes too pale—and felt a shiver, thinking that too much can end with a little bad luck and some darkness and a dull, flat _bang_. She felt like somebody about to be alone, for good. "Unless you'd rather stay where you are."

Then his hands were in his pockets and he moved down the sidewalk, out of the light, out of her sight.

She ran.

Some fish swim in the shadow of sharks; they hug close to the tailfins, knowing that bigger jaws keep bigger fish away. This might work well for you if you're a tiny enough minnow not to be worth a shark lunging back. Lily said _wait, wait, Nines wait,_ and she dashed, picking up her lost pink Nike on the way, to fall into step behind a vampire she didn't know. They were out of that dank byway onto the street proper within minutes. No other people—just jalopies scattered in a parking lot, dogwood trees that hadn't squinted out a bud in years, someone (who might've been a person once) sleeping beneath a beach towel by a trashcan fire. Rodriguez moved at one slightly too-quick speed. She kept a smart distance between them, not completely convinced; he glanced this way, that way, never back at Lily. She just couldn't be sure. You never felt sure. She was pretty sure he would not have waited for her.

Then they stopped there on the curb and got in a car.

It wasn't really a car. It was a truck, unmarked plastic crates tied in precarious stacks to the bed. She wasn't a position to ask what was in them. So Lily didn't ask, and she didn't think, climbing in and slamming the passenger door. Her cheek was still bleeding. She sank into the upholstery; the engine started; she ducked, trying not to look too curious, too talkative, or like she'd be trouble. It didn't feel like home-free, but at least these dark confines and the new car smell got her off that sidewalk. Everything about Lily was worn-out. She wanted to slide down, puddling, lanky limbs and carrot-top losing all their form beneath a shelf of dashboard.

"Sorry. I mean, thanks. Thank you. I'm really grateful," she mumbled, palms covering her face, and spoke into them for a while. They smelled of cement. She didn't sound like herself. "This kind of thing never happens to me. I don't know what to say. Fuck. Sorry."

Soon, movement. The motion of wheels turning against the street gravel didn't require opening her eyes; for that, Lily was thankful. It smelled like some kind of industry she couldn't explain—sawdust, oil? They made a right, a left, and then drove straight for a time. There was something bumping around inside the cartons behind her. She listened to that telltale _clink-clink-clink_ of turn signals.

"Are you like me?" Lily mustered up the courage to ask. Her eye whites were red behind the tips of her nails. They were red, too—crusty and ragged around the knuckles and thumbs. "You know. Thin-blood?"

"No. But I got my own problems. Where am I going?"

Lily straightened up and looked groggily out the windshield, taking a few seconds to gather her bearings. She felt dizzy, surprised to be here. Surprised to be anywhere. Everything was blurry until she could blink the fog away, melting a sleepy off-brown, like rust; it was old mailboxes, cars with no airbags, barbeque grills. Thankfully, her cuts had stopped oozing. Her head was muzzy and felt like it sat a foot too high. "Take a right up there. No, sorry. Left. Left, towards Garfield. So why do they want to kill you?"

She twisted around. He was focused too far down the road—there were signs, maybe, she didn't know how to recognize or could not see. With vampires, it's always demarcation lines: where can you go, when should you leave, and who hates you? _Don't miss the turn_ , she heard herself say. His eyes were stuck at a vague point blocks ahead where the pickup currently sat. They were pretty eyes, she thought, for a guy. Blue and lashy. He didn't look at her. "I got an unpopular name. You don't have to agree with me, but after that, you can't tell me I'm wrong."

"Hell no. I'm not telling you anything." Trembling fingers managed to pull on the missing shoe. Her sock was soaked, laces a lost cause. Lily hugged in the bent knee and propped her chin on it, feeling better to have her limbs close. "No offense, Nines Rodriguez, but I've never heard of you. I wouldn't know any of this vampire shit from a hole in the ground. I'm kind of green."

"How green."

"Pretty damn green," she told him. The cortisol rush and the heartbeat plummet made her chatty and overly friendly. She sunk five digits, pinky through thumb, into red roots to pull. There was a whistle of wind through cracked windows. God, her hipbone really hurt. "Couple of years now. Three, I guess. I'm not really counting days."

"Any idea about yourself?"

"Uh. Well. I like animals. I can't swim. My family's Republican, but I like Obama. I think I'm pretty OK."

"Cute," the Brujah said, not sounding like he thought so. "I'm asking about your clan."

"Yeah, I know, I was just..." Her attempt at a smile was dishonest. The question was surreal, sort of funny, and she felt punchy. There was a thick, wheaty fuzz growing in her lung that made her feel like she was drunk on some weirdo hipster brand of beer—Oberon, something Rolf always ordered, and Lily always bought him, even though he never drank. There was too much air in here, too much breeze, too much oxygen sweeping out her brain. "I wouldn't even know what to tell you," she confessed, beyond caring about cutseying up the lie. "My Sire didn't exactly pass me the family photo album."

"Ventrue," he guessed. The deduction startled her.

"You're the second person to suggest that to me," she diverted, not knowing to show or tell. Ms. Woeburne hadn't been particularly talkative about the subject; she said it wasn't something that concerned _"someone in your position."_ Rolf said even less. And those two were the only clanmates Lily met—two vampires who would've squirmed to be thought of so intimately by her, by stunted offspring they claimed no kinship with. _Ventrue_ was a wicked, noble sounding thing to be. "Why do you figure?"

There was a bump of badly-paved road. He _hmn_ ed again. "You think a little Ventrue."

"I do?"

"Little bit," Nines said, and checked his watch. Rodriguez did not see Lily's reticent stare, or any of her, really. He looked straight ahead, so he couldn't've notice her fingers had wandered, either, and had made some blind discoveries, things she'd rather not have found. There was a break-action shotgun duct taped loosely under her chair. She stilled both hands and put them stiffly down, one on each thigh.

"I could be wrong," he told her. The rust on his thumb ring could have been a bloodstain. He held the wheel with both hands, like a grown-up does—like the real, responsible kind of person you're supposed to trust. Maybe she was still in shock. He wore leather on his wrists like archers do and the studs would give dull, flat noises when moved too abruptly. She could have used something like that; maybe hers wouldn't have gotten stomped. Too much air, hyperventilation. It was like Lily's blood had dispersed, devolving into water, bubbling over river stones. It was getting harder and smaller inside the walls of her chest.

"Important thing is that you're outside this thing. Smartest thing you can do is stay away from them all."

Rolf stark ice above a collage of bland, sweating faces drowning in shitty bass. Ms. Woeburne glancing coolly over the lip of her laptop.

"It's not that easy," Lily knew.

There was a break in the strand of bleak advice. "What sort of work you do, kid?"

"Nothing important. Not like you mean. I clean on weekends. Uh, that's 'clean' in the regular way. Buckets and stuff. Not... I'm a housekeeper." The word seemed pathetic wedged there in-between her inhuman teeth. Lily blinked again. She watched him drive, then didn't. She rambled: "My boss is one of us. A Ventrue, actually. Lives downtown, which is why I was wandering around out here in the first place. An accountant or PA or organizer or something like that. I'm not exactly sure. My work's all domestic; nothing special, but I don't mind. Things could be worse. I mean, I work for a good person, you know? She looks out for me."

"I just scraped you off the pavement, honey."

"Yeah, but that's—I mean, she takes care of, you know, the business things. Officially. She's my sponsor, is I guess what you'd call her? She's just really busy. It's like she can barely get some time to—"

"Camarilla?"

"I don't know who that is," Lily admitted, and for no good reason, it made Nines Rodriguez kind of grin. "I don't pretend to know. I try not to fuck around with any of that. I'm just…"

"Nobody's," he finished.

Ms. Woeburne spitting blood at a bathroom sink; Rolf gathering condensation on his finger, a beer she got him before any of this. Lily wiped her face sitting shotgun in a stranger's truck. She wished somebody would bother looking up. "Yeah. Nobody's."

There was a slosh in the back as lanes merged that made the thin-blood twist, glancing over her headrest. Two fire engine cans of gasoline nestled in one corner of seat. It was a minor thing, but somehow, it worsened the feeling she was doing something illicit. Lily frowned. The bridges of her hit, kicked body were turning yellow and tender. It would have felt so much better to see something familiar. It would have been so much easier to sit there silently in her own clothes.

"God, I'm so late. I should've been in hours ago. I should be there right now." The smog haloed these skyscrapers, making everything look oozy, eerie-deamy, like a novel. She shoved up one sleeve; they were too big. "She's going to flip out on me. My boss. I'm supposed to call; I'm always supposed to call. I shouldn't complain, sorry. It's just stuff like this makes anyone paranoid. It's funny, I... I keep telling Ms. Woeburne: _'I've lived in this town my whole adult life, and nothing bad has ever happened.'_ So I guess the joke's on me. I guess I shouldn't have—"

"Woeburne. Did I hear you right? _Y_ ou work for _Woeburne_?" The Brujah's voice sharpened, pitch tightening—and, for the first time since they started driving, he looked Lily directly in the eye.

"Oh my god. Thank god. You know her." All at once, that knot of bad decisions melted away—melted clean to the bone—leaving the fledgling feeling gummy and relieved. There was a jittery, real smile on her face. If they knew the same people—if he'd met Ms. Woeburne—then they were the same people, or similar people, people who had something in common. If he knew Ms. Woeburne, then this was all right. It was all all right.

Nines Rodriguez smiled back. And this time, for certain, he meant it.

"Sure do," he said.

It's easy to ridicule in hindsight; it was easy to see the exact moment everything for Lily Harris changed.

"Tell you what. Why don't you go ahead and give her a call," the Brujah suggested. The smile was still alive on his face—a big one this time, showing all teeth. He'd already reached into his back pocket, sliding out a phone. It bounced on her knees. "Here you go, kid."

Lily caught it. She couldn't stop smiling, either, and the thin-blood picked up and dialed, feeling tingly, happy, and compliant, sandwiching the cell between shoulder and ear.

"Thanks a lot. You're really nice. You are like, the nicest person." Two rings, another left turn—despite the cracks in her mouth corners and the rawness of her throat, she held on to that stupid grin. They were going to be fine. Everything was. "You know Ms. Woeburne. She worries."

"Couldn't have that."

"Yeah, really. No way." Lily's face dimpled with the release of that pent-up breath, unable to stop it now. Her blood was her blood again. Her blood was her blood, and this was just a car—not a trap, not a secret, not a bad decision—and these were just shirt buttons, and that was just a man. She scrubbed a last bit of dirt from the bone of her temple. She rolled his sleeves at each shoulder when they wouldn't stop falling down. "It can get pretty bad."

Nines didn't say a word. He just kept on smiling, cool and unruffled as a California sunset.

"Ms. Woeburne? Hi. It's me. Lily," she reassured the receiver, raking and reraking the loose strands of her hair. Her body was all scrunched up in the seat but not like somebody nervous; like a teenager antsy at home. "Yeah, sorry. I'm borrowing a phone. Listen, I can't talk long. I wanted to let you know I can't come by tonight. Well, no. Maybe you should sit down." A brief, insulted pause across the line. "Look, I'm OK," Lily swore. And, more and more, it was beginning to seem like she was. "But I was attacked tonight, and I think I should just go home. Yeah. It was. No, they didn't really hurt me. I'm fine, I promise. I'm just sort of shook. No, you don't need to do that. I'm almost home. Well, that's what I was about to tell you. I got—Jesus. Sorry. It's just kind of unreal. I got rescued, I guess." It was a fairytale sentiment, something that would make her eyes roll had it happened to anybody else. She glanced over to confer with Rodriguez. He still gave her that pleased, Saturday morning smile. "Not like that. Some guy came out of nowhere, saved my skin. Hey, did you want to—?"

"I'm driving," Nines told her, sounding kind of annoyed, which Lily thought was a little wonderful. She retracted the phone and kept talking.

"No, I don't think so. I tried. I mean, I can ask; he's sitting right here. Yeah. Gave me a lift. No, no. He says it's fine since he knows you. Um. Nines, I think. Rodriguez."

Flatline.

Ms. Woeburne said something like: _"JUMP OUT OF THE FUCKING CAR!"_

"Wait. Wait! What?" Lily cringed as the Ventrue's volume rocketed up. You could hear it in the quiet of the truck: squawking, like a daytime cartoon. "Hold on. Why? 'Come get me?' Don't do that. I'm a couple blocks away! Because it doesn't make any sense to—" But she piped down then. Instructions flanked in. Her face began to widen and whiten, not knowing enough to react, more scared of Woeburne's sudden change in demeanor than what it implied. Ventrue don't have time to give context when something needs to be done. Nines would've kept smiling if she checked his way again. She didn't. "OK, all right. Just slow down. I will. I mean, Jesus—I'm not going to stand out on the corner until you get here. I'll call you as soon as I walk in the door. Fifteen minutes, OK? Yes, I'm about to right now! Let me hang up."

She clicked Ms. Woeburne off before the Ventrue could scream or finish her sentence.

"OK. Shit. So this is going to be awkward." Lily sucked in that breath she'd only just let out, snagging her bottom lip between sore front teeth. She stared at her sneakers, put the cellular down. She looked for the appropriate words. "She says I have to go. Right now. No excuses."

"Did she." Nines was looking peacefully out—far—too far—down that slow crawl of city road.

Lily didn't know what she would have done if he said no.

But he said: "Guess I better let you go."

"Thanks. I'm really sorry. I don't know what got into her. But I don't want to piss her off." The thin-blood felt for her wallet before remembering, again, it'd been swiped. She watched wheels tilt towards and stop at a curbside. It was difficult to turn back around and address the driver, ordered to escape him while still wearing his clothes. "Listen. I live right around that corner. It's two or three blocks. This is so stupid, I know. Just give me ten minutes. I'll run up and change so I can bring your stuff back, all right? Ten minutes."

Rodriguez dismissed her—and when he waved, the crude rings glistened on his hand. She couldn't have known why a Brujah had to vanish before Ms. Woeburne squealed up this street. "Kid, I got The Angels screaming in my ear right now. I'm going to go. Some other time."

"How will I…?" Lily began to ask, but the corners of his mouth turned south, and she shut up. "OK. Yeah, all right. I understand. Sorry. Thank you again," she said with her fingers on the door handle. "If there's anything I can…"

The vampire indicated nothing—did not bother to direct his eyes her way—so she hovered there, just long enough for her weak composure to regroup, before moving to step out.

He caught her by the arm.

"If you ever need help, you come to The Last Round downtown. You ask for Nines Rodriguez. Remember what I said. The Last Round. Nines Rodriguez. That's free people's territory. Nobody there will stick you in a fire for being what you are."

Then a business card was in one of her hands and she half-stepped, half-tripped back onto the sidewalk, inexplicably shaken, feeling drifty, like someone had cut her little life boat free from the hull.

Lily watched the truck drive off, unsure if she'd pulled her wrist away or if he let it go.

There was thinning cardstock left in her palm. Looked like it went through someone's washing machine a time or two. She carefully flattened it, reading what little was printed across that dull green face. It was only two sets of numbers—a central address, a telephone number to somewhere she wasn't going to call.

Lily turned it over for a moment. Then she tucked the card into her pocket, and headed home to wait on Ms. Woeburne.


	30. Cry Wolf

Ms. Woeburne was not pleased.

It was hellfire and brimstone that night with the Ventrue. She had been furious when Lily called, first time and second; she had been furious when Joelle brushed off her demand to see Mr. LaCroix; she had been beyond furious at the notion of what happened under her nose in a derelict little pisshole of LA. The Foreman's nails mashed neat, square welts into her palm heels, and her boot heels firecrackered against marble. Every detail incensed her _._ "Rescued" was the term Lily used, sitting baby-faced and ignorant in the back of a truck so full of gunpowder and gasoline a sneeze on a match might've leveled them all. It brought S.W. five centimeters and a hair from explosion.

There was no one word to communicate the Ventrue's current mood, as can be expected of most moods Ventrue have. But "rage" came close.

 _'Please,'_ Ms. Woeburne snorted to herself. Her temper punched inward, and her body was the perpetual coolness of dead things. _'Please, cut me some rope. A little slack. I should fire her. I ought to do it for my own good. And I might. I might have to fire the girl. That's just what I need—fewer people. Damned excellent. If they think I'll let this go, they've got—'_ There was only one way to finish the trite threat she had made: another thing coming. _'I don't have to tolerate it from them, and I certainly won't tolerate it from her. You had better believe I'm going to correct this. I'm going to turn this upside-down right on that filthy Anarch den.'_

She felt like her belly was full of smoke. She felt like, if she choked, it'd light up Venture's decadent curtains—incinerate all this fine silk. Perspective is relative. Anger throws long.

Ms. Woeburne was relieved Lily had lived—of course she was!—but all did not settle as it seemed. No. En-oh. Not even a bit. What this was, you'd need bigger teeth and bluer blood than a thin little girl to see. It was canvassing, intimidation, interference. Apparently imprisonment was not sufficient. Now S.W. must endure these immature little mind games, as well.

No, Ms. Woeburne was not pleased, at all.

She towed Lily by a wrist, unaware—and not especially caring—that their pace was tripping up the fledgling in her spit-shined Mary-Janes.

"I don't see why we're doing all this, Ms. Woeburne. Nothing happened," she said, for what was now the sixth or seventh time. Lily regarded the white imperial double-doors looming down the penthouse hallway with intuitive dread. "I'm fine. I swear I am. I'm fine and it's done with, and I already told you everything. And I really can't stand even thinking about it. So can't this thing just—?"

"No. No, Lily," the Ventrue told her. The small, bleached teeth smacked inside that straight-shot jaw; the words were prickly and would sink fast in water, dense like soaked wood. Lily could feel every step they took radiate up her shins. Ms. Woeburne did not look back. "It is not 'over.' We've gone through this already; I don't see why protocol is so difficult for you to understand."

She was yelling without realizing it. S.W. pivoted, saw Lily recoil, and forced her hackles into something more civil than that.

"I'm sorry. Really, I am." She said so. So she must've been. "This isn't your fault. And scolding you doesn't help. It's just—well, look, whatever it is doesn't matter. I can't promise you anything, you understand, but I'll try my best to keep you out of this mess once we're through here." This is what the Ventrue do: they assess, they address; they do not give promises, but they do put their best foot forward, and they'll make this effort known. S.W. blinked too rarely when the green of her eye went focused and bright. She was terribly, dependably squared. "Here's the thing. You know. The why. I need you to appreciate that what happened _to_ you is bigger _than_ you. All right? If we say nothing because it's upsetting to talk about, there's no way of knowing you're out of danger. Do you see why it's an issue? You could be in _danger_ , Lily. I could be at risk. Which is why we're doing this. That's why we must put it all out for review, even the upsetting things. Camarilla security comes from the betters we can confide in."

"Yeah, I know." Ms. Woeburne looked so fretful, a hard-to-bear combination of pursed mouth and knitted brow, that Lily glanced down at Sebastian LaCroix's floor. Marble and gold. She felt incredibly guilty for dragging her feet. "I know."

No, Ms. Woeburne did not rest; she did not unclench; she did not, for fear of losing traction, blink. " _But_?"

 _But_ , Ms. Woeburne would ask you. Never more than that.

"But I'm always in danger. People like me. It just seems that's where I should be focusing—mostly focusing—if I'm trying to stay out of this. The Sabbat tried to kill me. Not like that's real unusual, but…" She felt uneasy beneath the Ventrue's olive stare. The soft yellow cashmere of Lily's best dress itched like mad. It was hard resisting that steel wool urge to scratch. "I know. I know what you're saying; seriously, I do. I understand. I believe you. I saw you. It's just that last night, this whole..." Here the something is. "I'm just saying maybe it was a right-place, right-time thing."

The Foreman sighed. She couldn't in kind conscience blame a thin-blood for political naiveté.

But.

"Every action sends a message, Lily. This is how vampiric society works. This is why my organization tries to keep people like you out of it. I know it's perplexing, but please. _Please_ can you try to understand?"

The redheaded stepchild was thinking on her shoes again. S.W. felt a mite sorry for her, and gave Lily's shoulder a stiff, encouraging squeeze. It wasn't rough, yet it hurt somehow. It stung. "You won't need to worry about it very much longer. But you always have to remember who your real friends are."

"You are, but…"

"But what?" Ms. Woeburne asked, lips thinning. Her pearl earrings gave a hostile little shiver.

"I don't know." Lily sighed. She readjusted her headband, a drearily childish white, that flattened out delicate orange and made it sit still. "I feel wrong, I guess. Stirring up a bunch of trouble with your boss. You're going to do what you need to do, I know, and I don't want anything bad to happen on account of what I did. Or didn't. But it's sort of weird for me, being put in this position. I don't really know what I'm testifying about. It was just OK, that's all."

The statement plucked a sharp thing in S.W. She came back with enamel and fangs.

"OK? All of this, and that's what you say? O-K? Have you the slightest idea of what I am doing for you?" The glasswork of her glare looked less like glass and more like venin. Eye teeth tightened behind gloomy lipstick; muscles tensed beneath her crisp black sports coat. Two absentminded letters, and the Ventrue was screaming again. "Did you just sweep out everything I said because a man sidled up and helped you? That's original. That's fine."

"Ms. Woeburne, come on. That's not even fair. I was—"

"And aren't I helping you? Hmm? Right now. This isn't helping?"

"It is. I know you want to help me, but—"

"Let me tell you something, Lily. Since you're so interested. Let me clue you in. This victim-of-circumstance nonsense isn't cute to me—and it isn't, in any way, 'OK.' I'll put it clearly. I'll say it so there won't be any confusion. That was not a rescue. But if you insist, then by all means; let me give you the Anarch lesson. You already saw how I got mine! Let me explain to you what these people are. They are terrorists. Nines Rodriguez is not 'OK.' He is a sociopath."

"I was—"

"You were sitting shotgun to a pathological liar who would have shot you as soon as looking at you if you gave him an answer he didn't like. Is it clicking yet? Give you the shirt off his back; oh, yes; but don't be surprised when the Rabble call to cash in on that so-called rescue. Don't be surprised when you're the subject of a coup. Don't be surprised if you wake up in a basement somewhere because you were too 'OK' to listen to what I am saying."

"Ms. Woeburne…"

The Foreman sucked in an insult before it went free. Lily had shriveled, eyes wide, like a youngster does when she watches a grown-up snap. It was a grounding expression to have shined your way. S.W. took a deep, forcible, calming breath.

"Stand up straight, don't speak to the Prince, and don't make a peep unless I tell you to."

With that, Ms. Woeburne slid her glasses up her nose, and pushed through the Prince's door.

Mr. LaCroix was sitting comfortably at the large enameled desk—as comfortable as he got, anyway—not one measly black thread out of place on his suit. Los Angeles backlit his terminal blondness. There was a pen in his hand, what appeared to be a stack of fiscal reports face-up before him, and a bespectacled accountant standing nearby, armed with eager obedience, punching an intimidating calculator. Their bold entrance made the poor ghoul jump inside his pinstripes. For a moment, Lily thought he might leap behind his Prince's chair, anticipating who-knows-what, but the man managed to compose himself. In the next moment, his startled look brushed, blearily, against hers; they blinked away the surprise; you could see, in the whiteness of sclerae, small fish people behind big eyes.

It was LaCroix—soberly groomed, mildly annoyed—left staring impatiently at Ms. Woeburne. He shot her a helpless, disbelieving, bothered look, flipping out an elegant hand to indicate the ongoing appointment. Lily figured it a royal _"what gives?"_

"Mr. LaCroix," Woeburne reported. She did it fast—before the accountant could complain, or before the Prince could order his officer out. LaCroix's annoyance heightened with his eyebrows, until it was no longer a _"what gives?"_ but an _"are you serious?"_ It was frigid in here with air conditioning and luxury. Lily swallowed the odd taste on her stale tongue. "I'm notifying you of an Anarch situation, sir. It's local. The Barons are threatening me. You have to prosecute."

The Prince gave a lengthy, unimpressed, drawn-out sigh.

"Tremendous, Ms. Woeburne. I look forward to it. But, as I am sure you've noticed, I'm in the middle of something right now. Go wait downstairs until I call you. And apologize to Mr. Tomasek while you're at it." He glanced at the startled financier. Mr. Tomasek nodded at her—forgiveness, rumpled shirtsleeves, and watery hazel hiding behind circular lenses.

S.W. didn't quite seem to have heard him. She stood, unflinching, shoulders level; she was a captain at routine inspection, lacking only a scabbard at her left hip. "This is intolerable. I will not tolerate it. It's become a danger to everyone in contact with me. They obviously think I'm your spy. They must've drilled it into their little heads that carrying on like this will drive me out of commission, or at least out of Los Angeles, because I haven't budged an inch. It's ridiculous, sir. Abrams can't continue to protect him at this rate; they can squint at me all they please, but they can't justify harassment. They can't foist this on the people I—"

"Did Ms. Lefevre let you up here?" Mr. LaCroix asked, cocking one of those sharp gold brows. The pitcher-necked goose of a ghoul at his side still looked apt to bolt. He and Lily glanced mutely at one another, third- and fourth-wheels in a minor head-butt between Sire and Childe.

"Yes," Ms. Woeburne lied.

He peered at her.

Then—right on cue—Joelle burst in, looking scattered, wild whites flashing around the Prince's office with voiceless a sort of misery. Lean red misery, pomegranate flavor, synthetic wax, shade thirty-six. She struck up a remarkable resemblance, S.W. thought, to that folk saying: _chicken with its head cut off._

"There you are. _There_ you are. I have been looking for where you went! Of course I would find you here. We know better, don't we, Ms. Woeburne," the Toreador puffed, declaring her innocence in one scarlet blow. Cinnamon tendrils wafted out of order; a three-button dress in her invariable rose twisted at the waist. No wonder. No shocker, and no big scare. The Foreman had waited innocuously in Venture's lobby until Joelle took a ladies' room break, probably nervous about her makeup, and then she left-right-lefted straight into this foyer, not bothering to be cleared. Served Lefevre right. Served that flitting pastry right for letting vanity interfere with duty, if you'd have asked the Ventrue. Nobody did, and this is probably why. "We know we cannot just waltz up here whenever it strikes us. Whenever we please! Don't you see that you must check in with me at reception? Come," Lefevre ushered her, flicking both palms for deference, worried for her job. And, perhaps, for other things: for safety, for property, for an easy career, for a summer cherry cabriolet she drove around like a peach. "Away! Mr. LaCroix is very busy. You will need to stand in line."

"Oh, pipe down, Joelle. Finish your hair; then maybe _we_ will talk about what _I_ do and don't know," Woeburne barked, jerking an arm free. The Toreador looked as though someone had slapped her right in that petite pouting mouth.

The Prince tilted his head. He seemed interested. It was mildly less boring than what had been here a minute ago. Something to observe. "That was rude."

"That _was_ rude," Joelle confirmed. They stared at her, at S.W., who stared herself right back.

"Yes. I wouldn't come up here like this if my news wasn't urgent," the Foreman pressed. Mr. LaCroix, beneath that icy exterior, looked a tiny bit pleased by his Childe's abuse of poor Ms. Lefevre. And now comes explanation. And now comes business: preliminaries, introductions, then the core.

"Joelle," Ms. Woeburne announced—strict, neutral, from the stomach. "I spoke rashly. I should not have." (You will notice, like Lily, _I should not have_ is not _I'm sorry I did_.) "Please trust me when I say that this is time-sensitive. I couldn't shelve it. It could not wait."

The Toreador's sneer was mellow, her everyday sort of cringe, and full of how very little she cared. "I'll go on, somehow," Lefevre supposed. That snide face spoke a lot about the Ventrue, of having to work for them; of being higher-minded; of having better taste. Joelle had a way of belittling you like gouging a cigarette into an arm. S.W. let her have that one—because there were more important things, and because she deserved it, probably. She probably did.

"It's a security issue. It's an embarrassment," the Foreman pressed on. There was nothing in her hands, but one fisted, just like that. "And I think—in the interest of everyone involved, and for the sake of discretion—it must be dealt with tonight. Head-on. It has to be contained before anything worse comes out of it. Besides that: it's an outrage, sir, frankly. You'll see if you listen," she vowed. So many soldiers have pled this. So many vows are made of hot saltsea air. "If you'll just hear me out."

The Prince's forefinger uselessly massaged his left temple. He pushed out another sigh. "I _am_ sorry about this, Peter. Joelle. If you both wouldn't mind."

On the contrary, Mr. Tomasek looked relieved to gather his charts and shuffle back downstairs after the slightly crisped Lefevre. Ms. Woeburne did not care how neatly they fell into their sad little recess. The Ventrue scowled her sternest scowl.

"Thank you for your patience," he said to the retreating gray back seam and that vicious crimson streak. "This won't take twenty minutes."

Once the unsettled ghoul and the uprooted secretary departed, doors closing quietly behind them, Mr. LaCroix turned a real glare at his immalleable soldier.

"I hope you have an excellent explanation for bull-rushing my office, Ms. Woeburne." The Prince folded both hands, elbows settling on his desk. He issued Lily a flat, unenthused glance. "Hello."

The thin-blood, swallowing some unpleasantness and pinning back some fear, remembered to look at her feet, and she gave an awkward curtsy that went entirely unseen.

"Thank you for hearing me out, Mr. LaCroix. I'll be brief." She had better. Unimportant details pestered Sebastian. He was through-and-through a bullet-point type of man. "This is Lily Harris. She is my domestic employee." (The Prince's bluish mouth tightened. One sentence in; two trivial facts.) "Yesterday evening, Ms. Harris had an encounter with Baron Rodriguez—something I, for obvious reasons, take offense to. It goes without saying I find the whole thing too timely to be anywhere near comfortable with it. Before I explain, I should give a bit of context." She wetted her lips with the tip of a merciless tongue. "As you may know, Ms. Harris was not a licensed Embrace. She was born Caitiff. She has, unfortunately, thin blood. That said, she was registered with us according to regulations, and has respected Domain law, including all hunting restraints that may apply. I hired her on Ms. Lefevre's recommendation, actually. So I have seen to her lawfulness personally."

"Ah. This must be Mr. Toten's progeny. My regrets, Ms. Harris," the Prince added, startling her with a look and that pang of a name. Rolf never gave more than his first. Toten? Her Sire is Rolf Toten? It was meaningless and hollow and everything. She could not wonder about his apology; the thin-blood's wandering eyes were stuck in their own mottled reflection on Venture's polished floor.

Lily was about five seconds from "thank you" when she recalled Woeburne's instructions not to speak. Instead, the fledgling gave him a noncommittal nod and another faltering dip of her knees. She did not want to look at him for very long. The man her employer called "prince" was menacingly, unhappily impeccable—in speech, in movement, and in the way vampirism had structured his face. It felt less than fifteen degrees in here. He was symmetrical enough to be frightening. Lily didn't need it. She had something to be afraid of every night.

Ms. Woeburne dipped her chin, a brisk affirmative bob up-and-down. The woman was cleaner, straighter and better-built than a warship or two, but looked like a knock-off across the desk from her Prince. "Yes. She was attacked last night by a Sabbat pack on her way to my apartment. We're unclear on the specifics. But who do you guess interrupts them? I think you can see why I—"

LaCroix interrupted them, then: one eye-roll, one bothered breath out.

"Typical," he scoffed.

Whatever S.W. had been expecting him to guess, it wasn't that. She was unsure what to make of it. "Typical."

"Yes, that is what I said." At her quizzical look, the Prince elaborated, though seemed to resent having to do so. "It wouldn't be the first time a Baron made a spectacle of him or herself through, let's say, extravagant bipartisanism. You know how they are. It's loyalty games, Ms. Woeburne. This is how they operate. Now, how did _you_ become involved in this?"

"By association, for one." She was too keen on mounting the witness stand to be deterred. Not by that. Not by a scapegoat and a false act of courage, of vanity, of nerves. "I don't want to give you the wrong impression, Mr. LaCroix. The Caitiff's tasks are negligible; they are in no way relevant to me professionally. But Ms. Harris might, to some, be mistaken for my… assistant. Of sorts. And what I would like to find out is how we're to know Rodriguez didn't set the dogs on her in the first place. He could have spread that rumor to a local pack. It would set a nice stage for a political grandstand, you have to—"

"Possible, Ms. Woeburne. But." He gave the desk one firm, punitive tap. Yes, S.W.: even for you, it is always a language of _but_. "It is not provable, and so it doesn't matter, either way. What's done for show is already done. She is not a rostered asset. No one with judicial clout will care."

"You'll also be interested to know Rodriguez had Ms. Harris call me while she was still in his custody." ("Ms. Harris," also known as "the Caitiff," cringed at her word choice but wasn't about to say anything. She'd only just learned who Sebastian LaCroix was to the Kindred world, and shortly thereafter understood his relationship to her employer. It was kind of a mind-fuck, to put it lightly.) Ms. Woeburne, vying irritably for a home-run, continued: "She rang me on his cell phone, sir. If that isn't a shameless attempt to intimidate me, I don't know what is."

"And yet she is here," he observed.

"Well, yes," said the Foreman. "She is."

S.W. did not seem encouraged by the stare their Prince affixed her with. He blinked, disconcertingly slow, propped his chin upon both folded hands, and watched the bristling ancilla like a bored cat. Lily was wise not to focus on him. Ms. Woeburne unfortunately did not have the luxury of ignoring Mr. LaCroix, whose long looks could inspire a wide variety of insecurities within a miniscule block of time.

"Ah. I see your evidence is bullet-proof," he said—finally, awfully, enough to make her start to squirm. "Why even bother with quorum? I'll just phone Hollywood." Mr. LaCroix flicked up the desktop receiver and tapped his fingerpads down. Ms. Woeburne winced. Its dialtone overtook the silence, hanging there, waiting in a Prince's hand. "First, though, enlighten me. Exactly what would you like to say? Tell me, in your honest opinion, how this sounds: _'My Anarch peers: On Camarilla authority, I sentence your Baron to indefinite arrest for the killing of a Sabbat pack, and for causing the_ discomfort _of my cabinet._ "

When she did not answer, confidence the size of a chickpea, it might have been enough. Mr. LaCroix's skepticism hardened into disappointment. "You have a decent political mind, Ms. Woeburne. I truly believe you do. And, furthermore, I understand that you detest the trigger-happy fraud and his Toreador masters for what they did to you, personally. But for your own sanity as well as mine, consider the ramifications for every allegation we make. This has an air of what you might call _hostility_ to it. Abrams will no doubt think I am withdrawing our very tentative truce and fire up the chants of 'Murder in Long Beach' again. I cannot govern by theorizing on happenstance. So I ask, humbly, what is more important to you: getting in your cheap last word, or solidarity in my government?"

There was exactly one response. He didn't trouble waiting for it.

"Ms. Woeburne, I value your input, but you're being unreasonable. We all loathe Rabble; they've done something despicable to all of us, at one point or another; most of my Board would see the lion's share of them dead. Business comes before vendettas. Soldier your chin and deal with it."

Having presented what she considered threats and been met with cold control, S.W. bristled. LaCroix discerned this. For the sake of peace, or something like it, in their family (or something like it), he softened the scolding and beckoned his officer forward.

"Come here," Prince LaCroix said, pardoning whatever stupidity had puffed out tonight with a tired turn of his palm. When Ms. Woeburne stepped up, he reached out and took one of her hands. The pressure centered her. It was an attention-getting, if not comforting, grip. "You did a superb job acquiring those artifacts for me. The Nagaraja sent information that I am getting copied for you as we speak. Now, as your elder and as your Prince, I advise you: Forget the whipping you took from the Anarch Party and apply yourself to more productive tasks. I'll have some new intrigue waiting by the time you open your front door—something more worthy of your efforts. Yes?"

She breathed sharp out her nose because it was all the petty corporal had left to do. "Yes, sir."

"That is the answer I like to hear." Cold fingertips patted her knuckles. Ms. Woeburne despised being made to feel like someone's doe-eyed protégé, like someone's potted plant of a child. She was fiercely unapproachable and prickly cool, but all that understood, and all that said: the Foreman could've done far worse than patronization and petted hands tonight. "Now, then. Much as I'd rather catch up, Mr. Tomasek is waiting downstairs to irritate me with more penny-pinching. Send him back up on your way out, would you?"

She said: "I will."

That was enough to lose his attention for the rest of the night.

S.W., having breached her absurdity limit for one night, had nothing else. She frowned, sternly took the thin-blood's sleeve, and tugged her down—out, down, and through—until they were past those broad-shouldered lobby doors and clacking across the parking garage.

"That went swell," the Foreman cursed, slamming into her new car. Keys jangled in the R8's ignition; white paint radiated around them. The scent of fresh leather made Lily's stomach turn in the passenger seat. Woeburne looked _off_ transitioning from gold filigree to black upholstery. She looked like a middling thing flitting between canopies. She was back in her given place. "Bloody great case I made for myself. It's my own fault, too. Evidence. I brought you an eyewitness; what more do you want? Of course I would need a stack of photographs to be heard up there. Can't expect Sebastian to take us seriously just on faith," she was venting, yanking the shift, cranking the wheel. They backed out and bounced roughly over the exit floor speed bumps. Treads squeaked at the first, second, third city curbs. "Not for a second. Certainly not! 'Whipping,' was it? Hah. I tell you, I'd quit. I'd stroll right out, play fetch in someone else's Domain. 'Whipping.' That's good to know. That's clearly the handbook term."

Street lights sped by, a cool glow on umber hair. The fledgling watched the ancilla swear for a few more minutes before deciding to speak.

"Ms. Woeburne," Lily tried. "Ms. Woebune. I know this isn't the best time. Not a great time, anyway. But can I ask you some questions? Can we talk about things?"

"Aren't we," the Ventrue said, squealing unflinchingly through a five-point intersection. Someone honked and their car changed lanes more times than seemed necessary. In the interest of not feeling sick, Lily decided it was best to keep on staring at her shoes.

"You told me the Prince is your Sire. Does that make you... I don't know. Royalty?" She peeled the seatbelt away from her collarbone. S.W. choked on a cynical, self-depreciating laugh.

"No," Ms. Woeburne countered, firm and flat and a little bit humored by the fancy of that notion. Her eye teeth were short and phenomenally sharp. "I know some grunts in processing who might agree with you. But no. The Camarilla isn't a monarchy. Don't be fooled by the titles; they're not literal. It's tradition. Lingo. Whatever you think of that, offices aren't inherited; no position really is." Fine, it was tuckered-out; it was not all that descriptive. But _sharp_ was the word for this, and for her: S. Woeburne, wing commander, Air Force One. Or maybe Two. "It's more modern than that. We're not a Swiss democracy, of course, but communal opinion does play a role. More like a parliament. Your grandmother's parliament, not yours. Though, to be fair, even in middle-management—in a place like to mine—it certainly helps. To have a name. A name with a little weight."

"Like Mr. LaCroix?"

Ms. Woeburne hesitated. "Like Mr. LaCroix," she admitted, decelerating after her sports car passed a dawdling SUV.

Lily's brain was whirling ahead of her, a little carbonadoed by the revelation that her boss—her reclusive, top-button-buttoned boss—had been, all this time, descended from millionaires. She'd looked like a form-signer, maybe a legal aide. Her nights were full of wartime politics and knightly service to a name-only prince who sat like a king. "So you work for him, then? Your Sire's your... what? Your mayor."

"I do. He is. But please," the Foreman added, incidentally. "Don't call him that."

"I won't. It's just—I don't know, impressive. You must've really done something to stand out. What kinds of jobs does he ask you to do? Is that why you came to LA? Jesus, you must travel like a queen. Like that suite, and all those nice clothes, right? Did he buy you this car?"

S.W. shut her up with an irked _'ahem-hmm,'_ disliking the logical chain of conclusions.

"Oh. Oh—no—sorry. I wasn't trying to..." But Lily clapped her mouth shut, about-facing the possibility; there was no need to actually say the insinuation. There were plenty of better questions to ask. "OK, what about your… company? Organization. So the Camarilla is basically your government, right?"

The agent of said government (basically), gave an ambivalent nod. It wasn't much—sharp _yes_ with a sharp chin—but it was a reaction, and that was more than you could usually get. _Assistant_. She'd thought about it earlier, while they waited for an audience (or, more accurately, waited for Joelle Lefevre to leave her post). If Ms. Woeburne was an assistant to a Prince, Lily was an assistant to Ms. Woeburne.

"I guess it's good they're here," Ms. Harris, Assistant to Ms. Woeburne, said. "Otherwise who would keep the vampires from killing each other?"

"That's the idea," she agreed, speeding unconsciously through a stop sign. What Lily didn't say-hands limp on her sweet yellow dress, bows on her shoes, hipbone still sore—was that it seemed like all the vampires killed each other anyway. "I don't know if I'd put it that bluntly, per se; Camarilla functions are very complex. Very multi-faceted. Certain branches enforce law, some mediate, others manage and others regulate. But we do our best to prevent the local barbarian kings from blowing themselves into smithereens."

"And Nines Rodriguez is one of the barbarian kings?"

"Now you're catching on. Actually—no," the Foreman decided, bridge wrinkling, a fruitless dig, but one that she took. "That's giving him _way_ too much credit. Rodriguez is an insurgent. He's a gang lord. He doesn't have any real claims."

"Why do you hate him?" It just fell out of Lily. And it got corrected fast; Ms. Woeburne couldn't quite connect the glare. "I mean, I know why _you_ hate him," she threw in, redundant but safe. It satisfied the Ventrue, and they kept driving; the farther she got away from downtown, the more said Ventrue's digits loosened their death-grip on the steering wheel. "Why does the Camarilla hate him? Is there an election coming up, or something? The Prince was saying—"

Ms. Woeburne, when she was finished laughing, gave it some thought. Politics are difficult to summarize without delving into history—history and estates, touchy subjects demanding more time than a good Foreman would spend on her. So she simply went on. This is how you recapitulate; this is how you close it with a dotted-i.

"The Anarchs represent a dangerous model. Impractical, I should say—but that's another way of being dangerous. As this model is anti-Camarilla by design, you can imagine it doesn't sit well. Rodriguez resents us for disarming him. Of course he does. Resentment is a reasonable reaction to being pushed off your throne; you don't make friends by toppling warlords, not right away, even when you do it with bureaucrats instead of bombs. And we could have used bombs. Believe me, we could have—" She stopped; she shook it off; this was neither here nor there. "This is an adjustment period. It's how it usually goes with the Brujah. They love their darlings. They flock after them like a bunch of thugs," Ms. Woeburne spat. She could remember the weight of two grease-monkey henchmen who held her arms while a Baron laid rings into the Ventrue's face. "They don't all mean to be as stupid as they are. Most are just desperate, and like to hear someone tell them they matter more than they do. I understand Rodriguez is good at that. But it doesn't much matter what their State line is, because this isn't an issue of philosophy or -isms. This is about species survival. We need a chain-of-command to survive. We do not need self-serving Idealism. We can't afford it. Really?—that simple."

Ms. Harris shifted in her seat.

"At any rate," Woeburne finished, readjusting her glasses with two quick, uncompromising fingers. "The organization has mostly neutralized him. He'll fight over the bit of ground he's got, but neither he nor his party will be a problem much longer. Once their leader's gone, the rest will disperse. We just have to cope for a little while."

Lily did not catch the capitals— _Idealism_ , _State_. She had in her book a backseat full of guns and diesel, a bad business card, and a blue jacket slung over her dining room chair.

"Oh," she said.

She spent the next half-hour sinking in Ms. Woeburne's stiff leather seat, studying her stubby nails, not wanting to make anybody else gone.

You could see the parallels, she realized with a start. You could draw straight lines between this night and last one: somber stare, big teeth, threatening suggestions and the human gestures that broke through. They had both talked while driving and seemed distracted more than their passenger was worth. Sitting next to a barbarian king; sitting next to an emperor's squire who wore dismal makeup and didn't fold her own laundry. Two different ways to be made. Lily slumped into a bizarre, exhausted grin.

"Is something funny?" Ms. Woeburne commanded, a hussar in an Audi. She was only missing a rifle and a crown.

The child shook out her daydreams while shaking her head. "No. I'm sorry. It's just... it's been weird. You think you've got everything down, and then—?" Both hands hopelessly hit her lap. "This."

The Ventrue sighed. "I am trying to do what's best for you, Lily," she announced, sounding ragged, saying it over again. But—and there was always a _but_ —if you listened closely, if you forgot the cellophane, and blew away the hairspray, a genuine note of concern flustered, faintly, beneath that wire. The stick rattled its holster. They had stopped. They were parked. "Do you know that?"

"I know," she said, shook Ms. Woeburne's hand, and stepped out to face the cramped stairs of her apartment. It was windier now than it had been. Bushes hissed; cashmere flapped airily at the thin-blood's calves. She looked back at the blueblood in the white car. "Take it easy, all right? I'll see you soon."

"Wednesday," the Ventrue corrected.

"Yeah. Wednesday."

Ms. Woeburne is still her real friend, Lily decided. But this Camarilla thing would've made Homeland Security shit bricks.


	31. Ominous Portents

Ms. Woeburne flung her keys onto the kitchen bar, kicked off both boots, and collapsed onto her leather couch like a dead person.

She enjoyed approximately six minutes of silence before the wedding march of responsibilities came a-knocking at her door.

The first was the computer. Its inbox chime was two seconds of compassionless joy; she had to repress an urge to hurl something into her widescreen. ' _Temporary gratification,'_ is something you tell yourself when you're staring longingly at a sleek black boot heel. Obligations were blipping up on the answering machine, each beep a dig at her lower back. She tried to dull it. She tried hammering a fist to her forehead, palm heel thumping the tension flat, eyes feeling like lime rind beneath thin lids. When no amount of pressure helped, S.W. pinched the flap of skin above her nose between two fingernails, squeezing until this new, small, controlled sting surpassed the chaos of headache still banging around up there.

Then—just as relaxation began to tip-toe closer—her cell vibrated off the coffee table. She stuffed a throw-pillow over her face.

Lily left two messages (re: next week's schedule), Joelle was calling her mobile (thinly dispensing a series of deadlines), and the e-mails were from Sebastian. S.W. dropped down inelegantly in the computer chair and wheeled in.

Prince LaCroix's new instruction set included three uncomfortably vague PDFs on modern necromancy, a Tremere scholar's comprehensive _History of Clan Giovanni_ , and _A Brief Overview of Colonial Sub-Saharan Iconolatry_ (labeled: "for your edification"). The font was irritatingly small and scanned sideways. Fortunately, one benefit of being a soulless, emotionally-stunted bloodsucking monster is experiencing no guilt over how many trees go shredding through your printer.

So, kicking stockinged feet onto the desk and crossing her ankles, S.W. watched paper pile up with a blasé lip curl for a blasé sigh. She would've killed to bottoms-up a few shots of espresso. Now they'd send her dashing to the bathroom with fingers clasped over her mouth. Small cruelties are the sticky ones, aren't they. Ms. Woeburne shook out her cramping left hand and leant back.

Waiting on the reports, she twisted idly in her chair, clicked a retractable pen into dysfunction, and pondered ordering an expensive gourmet meal for fifty to Venture Tower—just to annoy Ms. Lefevre. But of course, she wouldn't do that. Not in reality. In reality, she'd had to leave pettiness behind a very long time ago.

Besides, dragging some Sireless thin-blood into the Prince's own penthouse is enough cheek for one evening, don't you think. Lucky thing for them both that Mr. LaCroix had been tired this evening—too tired to bother being angry about her rudeness. Especially lucky for Ms. Woeburne, he'd also been too busy for a semi-public temper-tantrum at his soldier. She nevertheless felt sore about being dismissed.

After what S.W. had begun referring to—even in her own mind—as "The Big Anarch Crash-Course of 2010," Mr. LaCroix replaced Empire Hotel's evening doormen with the three Foundation bodyguards she'd picked out. They spent long, monotonous hours shooting narrow glares at the Foreman every time she clacked through the front lobby. Ms. Woeburne would've normally objected to having such a fuss made. But—in the interest of actually being the spoilt Camarilla princess everyone thought she was for once in her life—she instead shot them crinkly, falsely sweet smiles across the orange marble, glancing obliviously out windows lined with lace. A diplomacy up-and-comer doesn't often have the luxury of being a superior bitch; she might as well take advantage while it lasted, which doubtless wouldn't be long. S.W. wasn't certain yet if Sebastian intended on relocating her to Los Angeles permanently. She simply assumed there'd be a plane ticket bound for Gatwick lying on her desk one of these nights.

Not that Ms. Woeburne much missed the estate, or anyone else Mr. LaCroix stockpiled there. Roderick rarely crossed her mind. (After all, if something explodes back in Hendon, who do you imagine will be the first to hear of it?) The thought of him there, blinking blindsided, by-himself and on-his-own, made her uncomfortable, and so—as with most things that made her uncomfortable—she did not allow herself much time to dwell on it. Which is why S.W. preferred being overbusy to overbored. An abundance of free time leads to such wandering, irritating thoughts. About her past office, and about her past life. Ms. Woeburne could not imagine a greater waste of undeath than wondering about those people.

_'Madison's next thing to dead, besides, and mother's pushing up daisies. Well. Good riddance.'_

Though, to be fair, it might've been amusing to roll by home one Sunday night in a six-hundred-dollar suit, in crisp agency car.

Ms. Woeburne snatched the hefty stack of hot paper, thumbed through it, and scanned for orders. Mr. LaCroix began the missive as he always did—with curtness, direction, and just a sprinkle of courtesy to make her less likely to foul everything up:

 

* * *

 

_For S.W._

 

Apologies for not following-up about this case sooner. A minor matter with Regent Strauss demanded my attention.

I trust you will be happy to hear the Nagaraja is pleased. As promised, she has provided me with fascinating information and, by extension, you with an assignment.

I have recently been in contact with a member of the Giovanni family. I realize this might come as a surprise, given our hitherto estranged relationship. Dusty old treaties (I refer here to the Promise of 1528; please see the articles I have sent) are antiquities, however, and bear little weight upon future allegiances. Therefore, I ask you to place aside all preconceived notions, as I have.

Thanks to the abovementioned data, it has come to my attention that Clan Giovanni is excavating a certain relic in Turkey. Because of the peculiar nature of this relic, I would like to acquire it for Camarilla study. I have spoken to both Mr. Strauss and Ms. Pisha about this, and we've discussed a potential arrangement. This is, of course, where your services come in.

You will meet with Ms. Mira Luciana Giovanni in three days, on the twenty-second of this month, at eleven o'clock. You will meet at my property, Café Cavoletti _ **.**_ There, you are to confirm whatever agreement we've reached with a signature. Upon receiving this signature, she will present you with an envelope. Once you collect it, you may leave and report back to me.

Do not open the envelope.

As always, you were chosen for this task because I have the utmost confidence in your discretion. Thank you for your work thus far. I hope you are well.

 

SL

P.S. Did you remember to apologize to Mr. Tomasek for interrupting his appointment?

 

* * *

 

Realizing that trying to detangle Mr. LaCroix's aims was a wasted endeavor, Ms. Woeburne closed the e-mail, scribbled into her datebook, shut down the computer and meandered off to scald herself in an uncomfortably warm bath. Dinner at an Italian restaurant? This was a mission for living creatures, for petty representatives and pleasant faces—it was nothing remotely like espionage—but after these treacherous few months, she wasn't about to complain. Meeting some Giovanni child there sounded simple and safe enough. Maybe she'd even find time to send the Anarch Party a nice thank-you note for their assistance to her girl.

 _'Or a box of dynamite,'_ S.W. chuffed, folded her blouse, lathered the hairspray out, and sank under a few feet of stagnant water.


	32. Loyalty Games

Lily didn't know what the hell she was doing here.

The thin-blood at this moment was frowning at her shoes, considering with some embarrassment the sad state of each plastic toe. She needed a new pair. These were getting ridiculous—eyelets threatened to pop out, grimy laces sagged. She'd glued the heels back on her lucky sneakers twice now, and still couldn't seem to throw them out.

 _'Maybe I should go. I should get out of here,'_ Lily thought, watching taillights flicker down the neglected street. But her hand rapped a second time on the dingy green storm door. Some paint came away on her knuckles, making them look start and pink and like she belonged anywhere else more.

This felt like a movie. Like the cheap horror black-and-whites—the kind that splatter so hard, they strip out the color so nobody in the audience pukes. ' _Shouldn't have come,'_ but it was too late, with her finger mashing into the tiny buzzer. There was no sign or plaque. Maybe that hooker down the block gave her shitty directions.

It was a bad idea, and she had been a little too aware of that going in. It's always a bad idea if no one knows where you are, far as you can tell. But there was no other way. Ms. Woeburne would've fired her, and E had too much else to worry about. He was frightened of Kindred, and would probably say not to go. They'd promised each other a long time ago not to be swept up in vampire politics.

Lily wasn't being swept anywhere. She just wanted to give Nines Rodriguez a handshake for saving her life or something, and return his stupid shirt. It would take fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes; what was the harm? None of these faction people bother with thin-bloods. If he was really interested in using her as leverage, surely the Brujah would've acted three nights ago, when she'd been sitting dumbly in his passenger seat, eyes out the window, bones in her chest.

Her ribcage still stung, and the tension in her back woke Lily up sobbing twice in these past three mornings. She couldn't pop painkillers because she couldn't stomach the dosage, or the sip of water.

 _"I am trying to do what's best for you, Lily,"_ she said. _"Do you know that?"_

At the end of the day, Ms. Woeburne was a good boss. She was straightforward, reliable, and pretty lenient, all things considered. But that lady thought everything was always about _her_. Lily had almost died, damn it, and Ms. Woeburne cried wolf to the Prince that Nines Rodriguez made a personal threat against his Childe. Some people are just raised like that, she realized. And she wanted to do right by her—didn't aim to make things messy, or hard—but when did that start meaning _stand up straight and bite your tongue_?

There was no secret society message about tonight. This was just something Lily had to do.

She was about to give up and flag down a cab when the storm door cracked open, and a face glared out.

The body beneath it was unexpectedly short. Short-short—like, standing flat on her Chucks, which were fire engine red, she barely came up to Lily's chin. The hair was red, too. It jostled around an ashen, ovular face with small features drawn toward—you guessed it—red lipstick, a perpetual sneer. She wore an army beret. She was maybe five-foot-two.

Damsel was always all diesel and cinnamon. Unhappy, chemical, like a can full of mace. Her eyes were intense, blistering green.

Lily's natural reaction was to look for a friendly hand, but she didn't. She didn't look for anything. She thrust out her right arm.

"Hi. Uh. Yeah, hello." The Caitiff didn't so much introduce herself as make clear the fact she still didn't fucking know what this craziness was. "Sorry. About the knocking. This is The Last Round, right?"

Her palm dangled. After what seemed like an awfully long time, the bouncer folded both arms and propped her compact, busty frame in the doorway. Lily tried unsuccessfully to peek deeper into the dim room behind her. She got scowled away.

"Wow," came the snort—finally. It was an offensive sound. Damsel frowned at that hand until the self-conscious fledgling retracted it. Lily fidgeted—a watered-down, lanky creature, a pastel heart sticker on a warplane. She felt like she'd shown up to box with no gloves, or skate with no skates. "I've got to say: this is a first. Tell me you're collecting or something. Because if you know the name of this place, you know we don't do charity and we don't like jokes."

"I'm not here for money. I'm not here for anyone." The perils of representing other vampires were menacingly relevant after scaling Venture Tower. "I was asked. Invited. Look, maybe I shouldn't have…"

"You're fucking kidding me, right? What the hell could you want here?" The voice was throaty, but petulant—toughened up, forced together, like crazy glue sticking things that weren't meant to stick. _Brujah_ _._ Those same long teeth; that same visceral scratch. Testosterone and kerosene. The scowl looked only a little older than hers. Lily blinked helplessly. _'God. This is so stupid. This is so stupid; what do I want?'_

"I don't want anything," she tried, shrinking away from the patio light. A moth was attacking the plastic around that grim outdoor bulb. The thin-blood was too tall, too leggy; the bones pulled her skin this way and that. "It'll only take a second. I just came to talk. I came to talk to Nines Rodriguez."

The Brujah shot her down immediately, black eyebrows forking towards baleful pupils. They were a darker and hotter shade than Ms. Woeburne's. "Yeah? He ain't here right now. Piss off."

Lily proffered the jacket, her alibi and her peace treaty. "Listen, really. I'm not trying to get something out of you. I owe him. He helped me. So I only wanted to—"

It got snatched. Damsel flipped the handful of cotton quickly, searching for signs of mischief. She looked surprised. "How the fuck did you get this?"

"I told you," the fledgling stammered. "I was in trouble. He helped me. My clothes were—I was in a fight; got in a fight—and I—"

"You had better not be fucking with me. I'll keep this." The coat hung off her fist. A large breath slid out of Lily. The Brujah frowned. "But you're not coming in. I don't know who the fuck you are."

"I'm nobody. Nobody. Like I said, I just—"

"I'll take it to him. Bye."

The fledgling bit her lip. She compromised. "Yeah, OK. I understand. But will you tell him that I brought it over? Because I don't want him to think I blew him off. One more thing," Lily remembered, snagging the door with her foot before it slammed shut. The Anarch groaned. That stonewall of woman was beginning to look tired. "And will you also tell him again that I'm really, truly grateful for what he did? Since he didn't have to. What I am. Who I work for. It was just a brave thing to do. Oh, and tell him…" She caught it again. "Tell him that I didn't mean to make any problems for him. If I did. I'm not sure what went on; I just didn't have much of a—"

It was enough for Damsel. Enough prattling, enough excuses, enough of a pain in the ass. She heaved out a loud, antagonized sigh to cut off whatever else Lily would've said. The door swung only a few inches wider.

"NINES," she roared into the smoggy pub. There was a shuffling; glasses clinked; one chair screeched backwards overhead. The tiny Brujah deadpanned at their first-floor rafters, waiting. Inky brown liner glistened beneath her eyes. She puffed a strip of poorly-dyed bangs out of their way. "HEY, _NINES_!"

"WHAT?" The shout came from somewhere upstairs. Lily's optimism tangled with dismay.

"I'M AT THE DOOR. YOU GOT—" Damsel switched her intolerant look back down. "Name," she demanded.

"Lily Harris," Lily Harris stammered.

"—LILY HARRIS HERE TO SEE YOU."

"LET HER IN, THEN," Rodriguez hollered back. "EVERY FUCKING TIME, DAMSEL. JESUS."

Damsel tossed a hideous face towards the ceiling, threw the jacket at Lily, and flung open the door.

Stepping into The Last Round, it was like stepping into the mountain camp, the rebel tents between scorched trees. A nondescript haze encircled them: charcoal, bass through shitty speakers, spilled sugar, tobacco. The walls were covered. Not new paint, not paper, but items; political posters, notices, and diagrams were peeling from every stretch of darkwood. There was a full bulletin board of clipped newspaper articles on one; on another: post-it to-do lists, thumbtacked maps, rents and dues tallies, printed images. And on every side of this grim green first-floor room, you'd see a scattering of shelves, hooks, and ropes that housed weapons. Some looked functional and oiled, ready to discharge. Others were retired. Some had words beneath them, names that fit firearms; others, stoic memorials, fit for people not around to pull the triggers anymore. It was hard to tell between them sometimes: _Grace, Casey, Utah_. Dead friends' pictures were tacked over booths with torn upholstery, love pledges scribbled in marker across the cheap frame glass, a couple angry goodbyes written right on the plaster. Behind the pine bar, beyond stacked boxes of bullets, hung a dartboard; upon it, someone's unflattering depiction of a man in a tie. She guessed Prince LaCroix. It had been so defaced by dart tips and black pen as to be indecipherable, and its edges were curling away.

There was a handgun sitting open on an end table. She did not know if it was real, loaded, or recently used.

Lily took more steps. It was a muggy kind of heat in here. Unused liquor sat in cabinets behind the bar; it was a tasteless, drunk-fast collection that must've been for the ghouls and the dolls. You couldn't always tell the difference. Sometimes there wasn't any. One of those them, there at the counter—a man in a red windbreaker, pink-cheeked, hunched on his elbows, who couldn't have been dead—glanced over at Lily. He was gaunt in a fearful way—not in body, but in the luster of his pupils, vessels swollen with alcohol. The lines in his mouth were unkind with misery. She looked up just to look away.

Avoiding that ghoul with his less-than-sober eyes, she got lost in the ceiling. A rusted machete was stuck in a rafter; must have been there for years. So there was a knife overhead, and dust on the fans, and creaky windows, skreeked shut. And patrons—only four or five—who flashed uninterested looks at Lily when she tiptoed through. Boots with spurs and thick, ragged leather; painted jeans; backpacks with keychains; American flags. She tried not to look at them, but there are only so many places a person can stare.

The redhead who'd let her in had galloped up the far staircase. A scarred brown eye frowned unhappily at her from its post beside the storage closet—big guy with rings in his ears, rifle on a strap. He ignored the newcomer as though he saw them all the time. Another man greeted her with black irises and a mouthful of frightening, tar-bitten teeth inside his overrun beard. There was a girl sitting in a smoky booth—ruby hair, skull cap; sweet face, triceps; huge knife in a leg sheath; horrible, eat-shit sneer—that looked sixteen-years-old. For some reason, she scared her more than anyone else. Lily had never felt so out-of-order. Her tee was purple and her shorts were, yeah, probably too short. _'So stupid. So, so, so fucking stupid.'_

Lily looked at the faces on the wall, the ones who couldn't glare back.

Except one of them did. Squeezed in with those photographs was an old portrait, nailed above the second-floor stairs. Cracked paper circled deep, dispassionate eyes; rose-yellow hair curled in against her chin and cheekbones. She was glancing sidelong, black chiffon and evil tones. She wondered how old Ms. Woeburne really was beneath the dismal blush. Old, maybe. Old as in before Lily had been born—before she entered the realm of possibility. You couldn't worry about things like that. Nobody seemed to know if thin-bloods were immortal. Nobody especially seemed to care.

She studied the painting for another minute, unsettled by how that gray stare seemed to follow hers, then took a step forward, and smacked into Nines Rodriguez.

"Kid. Watch where you're walking," the Brujah scolded her, grabbing Lily's shoulders and maneuvering her aside like a misplaced chair.

He'd been heading down the stairwell when she bumped into him, eyes everywhere but ahead of her, something that was becoming hazardous to Lily's health. There was a stitch of impatience in Rodriguez's face. Dark brows made an unfriendly color out of heather-blue; he was a little annoyed at her. He had something better to do. He looked the same, like the first time she'd seen him: unworried, not-now, I-got-to-live-here, plainclothes resolve. Tarnished rings caught the bad lighting and he still had the archer cuffs on. The pistols were there, too. They were easy to see inside the leather of his black coat.

It was too late to chicken out. Lily stood for a second before hoisting up her surrender flag. The crumpled fabric didn't really retain its shape.

This burst out of her mouth: "Hi, you probably don't remember me, but we met downtown a couple nights ago, by this nasty garage, and I was—"

"I remember. You were getting your teeth kicked in by some shovelheads."

"Yeah. That's, uh. That's me!" She tried to be funny about it. But a couple steps took the fledgling farther away from where he'd shuffled her—she was nervous, and could feel individual hairs on her arms, shins, spine. Lily couldn't tell if it was because of the Baron or what had to be said to him.

"What are you doing here?" he asked her, brutally, artlessly blunt.

"You gave me a card?"

He blanked. It was an off-puttingly innocent tone for a question that should have pissed her off. "That's not what I asked."

She stopped groping at her pocket for proof; it wasn't there, anyway. "I can't stay long. I just wanted to bring this back to you," Lily said, and shook the handful she had. He caught the shirt, gave it a disinterested glance, and slung it over a nearby booth. "I washed it. Had some blood. Probably mine. But it didn't stain."

"Good. Thanks." He didn't give a shit.

"Yeah. You're welcome. I mean, thank you. That's the other thing." She was scowling; probably caught it from Damsel. Lily reached up and scratched her left eyebrow until it settled back down. "I thought I should drop by to, you know. Say thanks. Thanks for that. I would've been in serious trouble if you hadn't stepped in. Really. I would've been—" She winced. "I don't know what I would have done."

"Died," Rodriguez noted, casually.

"…died," she agreed. There was a flatness in the way he said so that disturbed her. The thin-blood swallowed. She looked elsewhere. "I'm grateful."

Rodriguez's snort came from somewhere ahead of her. He was, too—he cast a shadow on the uncarpeted wood—but Lily didn't look at his face. She'd rather stick with the shadow. It couldn't see her; it didn't have the eyes. "I hope you're more than grateful. You better be smarter. Because nobody will scrape your ass off the pavement again. You might think it doesn't apply to you, but we've all had to fight to get where we are."

A finger jerked toward her nose; it made Lily jump and look up.

"I hope you're listening to me," Rodriguez said. The Anarch seemed displeased, and his expression disliked her, as though he was offended by the looking down. "I hope you care. Because those bastards were going to have a party with you. You almost got ate. You don't hear that, you need to start, because you are not making it, child. You are not making it."

Lily was spooked. She'd expected a lukewarm _whatever_ and maybe a pat on the back before being turned loose. The judgment made her grimace, caltrops stinging; her nerve tried to recover. "I am listening," she promised. Her hands hoisted up in a defensive posture and her line of sight peeked after them. These cheap lights made the orange in her hair murky, disappeared the freckles. "I am, I swear. I hear you. I don't think it doesn't apply to me. I'm just…"

"You're a baby. That's fine. Let me tell you who cares."

"I know. Jesus, I know; I get it." She swallowed; it was rocky; it hurt. "I'm trying. I'm new, all right? I'm tired. I am so tired, and—I don't know. And I'm tired of that, too. It's not easy. This harder than anything I have ever done, ever. People are shooting at me, and screaming at me, and everybody's always lying or telling you something different, and I'm just sick and fucking tired of it."

Rodriguez was staring evenly again—no sign of approval or disapproval—just observation. He waited a minute to see if she'd say anything else. Lily's throat was burning in a claustrophobic way; temper irritated the crosshatching of her pipes. Another lecture was exactly what she needed. A finger in her face was fantastic after being dragged into Prince LA's penthouse as a political bullet-point. It tumbled stones in her tummy. She breathed out angrily and floundered to stay calm.

"You're right. Look, I know that. I messed up," Lily admitted, losing the battle beneath ten seconds of that unreadable gaze. She wanted to kick something across the room. Ms. Woeburne might've been too puffed and Ventrue to accept the possibility she could screw up, but small fish don't have those reservations. Lily didn't care. She was feeling mangled and hopeless and cast ashore, and when she saw the Baron's calmness—the nice-timing, nonchalant, no-hurry attitude he walked around with– she got rougher, and shaky, and desperate. And angry. Angry, too.

"You call it whatever you want. Doesn't make a lick of difference. What happened to you was going to, and is going to, try to happen to you a—"

"I know what was happening to me. They were going to open my chest. God! Who the fuck does something like that? It scared me," she wobbled, sounding raw, not bothering to be embarrassed about it. Her puppydog limbs seemed very full and very stark and very bare. There were other people looking at her in the main floor of this sooty, scattershot bar, but Lily couldn't see them right now, and she couldn't dam up the breach. There was wetness in the corners of her eyes, but she wasn't sad. Nines Rodriguez looked at you as though he wasn't aware why his cruel questions or his face would make somebody painful and upset. "Scared the shit out of me. But that's the way it is. That's why I am not going to just shake off and be cool with it all—why I can't snap my fingers and stop. Stop fucking up and make it. How am I supposed to do that? By having people tell me I should? God damn it. Why am I yelling at you?" she yelled.

Nines Rodriguez didn't say why or how. He considered, his back to the unlit reach of hallway climbing up into the darkness of the second floor. "Come upstairs," he suggested.

She shook her head and hugged her stomach and quit the chattering in her rear teeth. "No way."

Lily said she couldn't, but then she did stop. Just bit down on it, let the adrenaline run out in tremors, feeling electrons in the backs of her eyeballs and the soles of her feet. Her tongue was sore like an infection from the toughness of holding back. No one was looking at her, after all—nobody else. Bigger fish had bigger things to do.

"Look. I am not trying to disrespect you, or get cute, or be stupid. I owe you my life. OK? You saved my life." It was not exactly a compliment. "But this is what my life is. I'm not here to talk about politics, OK? Please don't be offended. It's just that I'm trying to keep my nose out of all this. All this vampire bullshit," she finished, spitting it out.

Rodriguez stared at her.

Then he smiled. It was small. Small, cool down, between-you-and-me. It did not make her feel any better. "I'm sorry," the Baron said, stepping back, playing up. "I misunderstood you. You're trying to breeze on through here, and I'm keeping you from it. Well, you go right ahead. Get yourself a drink. Don't let nobody stop you. Tell them I say to get you whatever you please."

"No. No, thanks. I'm good. "She ignored the joke made out of her. Lily waved off the gesture he made to the steel freezer, too, an icebox huddled behind their unstaffed bar. She was coming down from the outburst now, hot energy dissipating. The dampness dried up, leaving a chill in her extremities, and an odd winnowing—an in-out relief where embarrassment should have been. "I feel like I should leave."

"Child, you do whatever comes natural. Last part of this city you can."

The Caitiff exhaled. She felt better, and was about to laugh at the tough time this crazy, stupid venture was giving her, but Lily did not laugh when she saw the Brujah. His sudden, low-key change in expression was unsettling. He glanced past her—to someone else—and gave a slow shake of his head you could barely see. She saw that _no_ , but she hadn't seen the Gangrel walk up behind them, asking with his sneer if it was time to chuck her out. Skelter went back to his business in the storage room. She kept both arms slung around her belly. She checked her cheap watch. It read a quarter past two.

"The thing is, Mr. Rodriguez, there's more I wanted to—"

"Only time somebody 'Mr. Rodriguez'-es me is when I'm about to get lawyered."

"Force of habit. Nines," she corrected, not particularly wanting to relate to him. It was smarter not to compare anything in here to Ms. Woeburne or Rolf. The Brujah folded his arms, and they were a lopsided, irregular mirror for a moment—Rodriguez and Lily—before he leant back against that bit of stairwell archway. It was dark up there. She felt threatened by the trill of instinct that came from wandering too deep into somebody else's den. It was all one bad feeling in the center of her, up the hairs of her forearms. "I wanted to come by to thank you for what you did. Not shout at you. I'm an idiot. The worst idiot. But you helped me, and you put up with me, and I feel like I owe you something for it. That's why I didn't talk myself out of this, probably, because I can talk myself out of pretty much anything. Maybe that's the Ventrue talking; I don't know. Look: point is, thanking you is only part of why I'm here." The confession seemed to dehydrate her. Suddenly Lily really could have used that drink. She couldn't continue right away. She breathed out with shut eyes.

So she couldn't seem him duck lower, peering at her with one brow cocked, waiting on the rest. His voice was quiet and a little mocking. She took too long. "What's the other part?"

"Listen. You helped me, so I felt like I had to tell you. Ms. Woeburne is pissed off. Very pissed off. She thinks you were sending her some kind of message. I didn't want to make a huge issue, but she said it needed to be known about. And she went to the Prince. She had me go there with her and tell them everything. I am so sorry. Believe me; I am sorry." The thin-blood's hands scrubbed down her cheeks, dragging skin, a buzzing replacing her pulse. She didn't want his reaction. Memory warned to prepare for a fist. "I told her it was just a thing—just some stupid thing that happened—but…"

Lily glanced up to find out why she wasn't being shouted at. The Brujah looked impressed by the general unimpressiveness of this news; he looked somewhere else. He seemed bored. "You came all the way out here to tell me that?"

"I thought you should know. I can't repay a rescue, but I can pay you a favor."

"Kid, don't take this wrong—but there was no way in hell your friends from the tower would let that be," he told her. The Baron's explanation was frank, maybe a bit cocky. "I appreciate you trying to pay me a favor. It took guts. But save yourself the trip next time you get a burnin' urge to tell me the Ventrue don't like what I do."

"It's more than that." She was invested enough to finish now. That clammy sweat feeling was in Lily's hands now; they got rubbed on her shorts. "Ms. Woeburne was talking about charging you with something. In some court or congress, I guess. I'm not positive what; it didn't go too well. But it seemed serious. She was serious."

"That's just blueblood conversation, Lily Harris. This isn't going over in any kind of way it hasn't already. Ain't about you, her, and it is not about the other night. They've had it out for me before she or you stepped in. And I'm sure Ms. Woeburne can make up better reasons to knock my door down."

There was something horrific about the way a Baron said her name. It was too personal for Lily and sounded untough. She thought about blood spots on her futon cushions, red spit in her bathroom sink. It would've been so much simpler to be here except for the frozen reflection of Ms. Woeburne, standing in Lily's living room in a set of Lily's clothes, with a fierce snap in her well-built nose.

Lily didn't know what she was saying. But here it came: "She has reasons. She doesn't have to make them up—you did stuff to her. I saw it after. You people kicked the shit out of her. I'm not getting involved in it. But she wants you gone, and from what I know—it's not a lot, but it's what I know—Ms. Woeburne is the kind of person who gets what she wants done. You made an enemy when you went after her. That's all I can say."

"Did I," Nines asked, and she didn't know how to answer. The question wore a arrogant, cynical air.

"I don't know what you did—either of you. But I know what she looked like. And I know who she is."

The Brujah's calmness was intimidating. It threw you off of the tallest soapbox; it made you second-guess your convictions. Lily couldn't tell how unhappy he was with the explanation she gave, and wasn't about to guess what he thought of her, in general or tonight. Rodriguez waited to see if the discussion was over. He parked a sole on the wall and blinked. She wasn't much to talk to. She was a brief distraction, a rumple in the course of his night.

"I could tell you a story, kid. But I'm not going to do that," Baron LA announced, like he was trying to set an example, but how should she know what it meant? "I'm not going to tell you what to believe. What I will tell you is this. You do not know me. You do not know my people. So when you talk about the Ventrue—when you're talking about vampire bullshit—do not group us in with those snakes. I do not appreciate it. And neither will they."

Rodriguez wasn't looking at her anymore. He'd reset the frown, turned his head—so she, too, glanced away. There was a nick of a scar under his bottom lip. You can be the best storyteller, the slickest rebel in the whole world, and he wasn't; but even if you're sorry, and even if you're smart, some of that evil you just can't hide.

"I... want to take your word for it," she figured. "But they say you're a pathological liar."

"You know what they say about lies, Slim."

Lily did not, but she pretended she did.

There was a clock stuck in disrepair above the bar. Two-thirty gone. Two-forty-five. "I better go," she decided. That suffocation was back – that whisper of heads-up, of _stay shallow, small fish_. "I'm supposed to be somewhere else."

The Anarch's smile twitched, twisting the old cut, one eyebrow rising. "Woeburne's curtains must need dusting."

"No," Lily snapped, harsher than she meant, feeling defensive of Ms. Woeburne. Her arms clenched. The wrongness was multiplying again, making this dark place feel adversarial and cramped. He might've been implying something dirty but she didn't care. What a weird position to be in, an echo of that stiff _ahem_ her boss had; a snub by association. There were too many damn parallels to these people. That feeling of being misplaced returned louder than it had before. "But it's late. A lot later than I like to be wandering around. I shouldn't have come at all. It was dumb. Really amazingly dumb. But I did what I set out to do. So I'm going to get back before somebody misses me, and it gets worse than dumb."

Rodriguez lifted both palms as if to hold her at bay. His gesture was disarming. She remembered—scrunched in an alleyway, bricks digging her back flesh, a glance at the same two open hands. "Whatever you say, half-pint. Wouldn't want to worry the brass. You're probably already in a heap of trouble for the other day. She finds you here talking to me, you might just wish I let you take your chances with the Sabbat."

Lily's sigh was frustrated. She scratched the inside of her elbow, sorely long-limbed, almost thinking it'd be easier to give up and stay. Sit at the bar and drink a glass; what would it change?; never come back. It wasn't bullshit—she really did know next to nothing about Nines Rodriguez, save for the fact he did a fantastic job of making her feel like an ungrateful little mongrel without saying much of anything at all.

"It's not like that," she fobbed, wringing her hands. "I'm not in hot water with her or anything. But I still can't be late; my—"

Rodriguez looked patiently at her, a blink the color of galvanized steel.

"My roommate," Lily finished lamely. Her tongue went dry. _'Oh, fuck. Great. Sorry, E. Now I'm going to have to feel shitty about this, too.'_

"I get it. Do what you have to do. You got time to kill, sometime you're feeling braver—stop by again. You don't have to talk to me. But there's other kids in here you could know," he said, glancing past her, and she was again aware of the other people in this room, few of whom seemed to be paying attention even in the slackest sense. The girl who'd smirked at her earlier tossed up an _OK_ in passing recognition. Lily forced a wave back. It dangled. "I'll tell Damsel to let you in without an inquisition."

"Because we're really fucking friendly once you get to know us."

It was a growl from beyond the Brujah's left shoulder, and it had no suggestion of friendliness or ever getting to know her. The redhead Lily met earlier stood higher up on those stairs, small body somehow blocking everything behind it. She'd welded on a stern scowl, bright heels perched wide, sulking much as someone glowering could. There was a bone to pick and Damsel dealt a boyish thump to her leader's ribs. He grabbed his side by reflex. She hit harder than her small hands appeared. They looked like two people about to start bickering—veiled, indirect eye contact; sharpness; the old scabs of knowing each other for too long.

"Hate to rain on this fun fucking parade," Damsel said, eyebrows hopping like she couldn't care about anything less. "But we have important shit that needs to get done. I've got, like, seven more things on the agenda to go over with you. I've got a lot you need to—"

Rodriguez's voice hardened, and something in him faded. Two seconds. Raw tin. "Excuse me; was I talking to you?"

It was menacing, suddenly, for no apparent reason. Damsel stopped. She really did—her eyes went blank for a breath, and fell, as if by accident, on Lily. The Den Mother hovered there in-between steps on the stairwell.

You know, at first, Lily thought Damsel was jealous. She honestly thought that. Not just generally jealous, but jealous of her, and maybe that's a pathetic kind of funny. But she didn't think so after that glimpse. There are so many worse and better reasons than jealousy to look at somebody with eyes that scream _go away_.

None of it was worth a fight, so she balked, and she sneered, and the littler Brujah banged back upstairs, footsteps peevish on the creaking wood.

"Stay out of her hair," Nines advised. They watched Damsel stomp five steps up and out of view. "She's cranky."

Lily winced, watching over the Baron's shoulder until there was nothing to see, then listening feet falling overhead too hard. "Yeah. My bad. Earlier, when I came in—I think I must've pissed her off."

"Honey, that is Damsel. Everything pisses her off."

"It's OK," Lily assured him, buoyed by the assurance she'd be walking out of here soon, on the open asphalt, and on her way home. She hadn't liked how fast his face changed. "There's nothing wrong with being cautious. Besides, I don't know when I'd be able to come back."

"Que será será, kid. I'm not going to hold you to it."

Rodriguez thought about that for a minute, though, fishing one cigarette out of a jean pocket to stick in his mouth. He did not offer Lily one.

"Tell you what," the Baron said, pawing his coat for a lighter. "You go on back to the Ventrue. You find yourself at my door again, maybe I will tell you a story, if I'm around."

"Sounds good," she lied, hanging onto her shirt hem, feeling like she ought to say something more decisive.

He jerked his chin towards the exit, a motion that meant _go on_. It was a load off her shoulders. She nodded _yes_ for no reason; she was dying to leave. "Anyway. Red ain't wrong. It's late, and you got places to be," Rodriguez observed—and there was finality to his statement, squeezed between the unsubtle hints he had other things to do. The Brujah looked pretty done with her. And she was past done here—had accomplished everything on the list—but Lily couldn't quite square a goodbye. Something halfway from stupid to certain felt unfinished. The thin-blood watched him fumble with the lighter, his lost interest a half-hooded, pale blue.

"In case I don't see you again," she said, weighed the chances, and—not sure if she liked them—wore some grimness on her farewell. "Thanks. Really. Thank you."

"Get out of here, kid," Nines Rodriguez told her.

So she did.

Smiling Jack was still laughing when—six days later—Lily was standing, pockets empty, legs cold, thinking _stupid_ , outside that dark green door.


	33. Omertá

There S. Woeburne sat—serious face, dark suit, cream-white camisole—tucked away at a corner table, counting bread loaves and tracing circles around her wine glass.

Café Cavoletti was a nice, upscale Italian kitchen; it felt homier than she would've expected of Mr. LaCroix's properties, but still checked in at diplomatic. The Prince entertained visiting dignitaries here. He'd cordon off the next several buildings for summits, fencing some Toreador in and others out, ensuring the decadence that clan required. Royal purple suffocated the open windows. The evening strings were a mix of what sounded like cello and violin tonight. Glassed green candles burned slowly at each place setting. Waiters dressed in spotless, somber black. Alfresco, across the oak patio, grape vines tangled in thin French latticework, enticing bees. It was exactly the sort of misty, self-important venue S.W. would've liked reading in before her Embrace.

 _'Probably Plath,'_ she thought, sniffing critically at a small twig of cinnamon potpourri, flinging it somewhere forgotten. A businessman ate some gnocchi with thick, boxer's hands and rubies in his ears. _'Definitely Plath.'_

Mira Giovanni had yet to slink her morbid way in, and Ms. Woeburne was almost grateful. The milieu was oddly relaxing. It was a secure Camarilla eye in Baron Abrams's strutting Hollywood. While Prince LA claimed he valued Café Cavoletti's tourist revenue above all else, S.W. knew her Sire a little better than that; what he really appreciated was the freedom to host upper-crust parties in the thick of a so-called Free-State. Funnier still, Isaac's own Childe had expressed interest in Cavoletti several months ago—he'd've converted it into some smoky beatnik dive, some place where you slithered in with sunglasses and paint on your slacks. When Mr. LaCroix overheard Rivers's plan, he quickly negotiated a Foundation lease. So, yes: it was a pleasant nook for politics, for rubbing elbows with rich guests. But it was also a thumbed nose at a swaggering rival, which is, safe to say, something men like these prize in these tenuous pre-war times.

 _"Don't let the raw numbers dazzle you,"_ S.W. remembered Sebastian saying one night in New York over a stack of expense reports. It was during that brief trial period, her obedience test, shortly before she'd become what she is. _"Recognize that the value of capitalism, Ms. Woeburne, is in your ability to use what you own."_  
  
_'Fine advice from a capitalist,'_ she'd scoffed to herself, knowing—as all her people all do—that war profiteering and contract empires are the fastest ways to purchase your power in coinage or spades.

It was unavoidable. And it was something S.W. had learned to square with long ago, when she first began at LaCroix Foundation, sweating over the astronomical figures and the crimes they implied. Price bubbles, laundering lines, and offshores are the tried-and-true keys in this age. Besides, old Ventrue taste for custom is somewhat contrary to innovation, so modern-minded people—people like Ms. Woeburne and her Sire—are still valuable members of the team. Ms. Woeburne is not especially sure she is modern-minded. But she shouldn't snicker at her Prince for his showmanship, and a young blueblood should not behave as though she is in a position to morally pick-and-choose.

Café Cavoletti and its mauve curtains were meant to instill respect more than coddle senators anyway. It was a spot of power game in Hollywood; it demanded that a magnate's claims and properties (and, perhaps, agents) be taken seriously. A penthouse marbled with classical art; living centerpieces to usher guests about, the bureaucratic likes of Lefevre; Ms. Woeburne's ridiculous cars, each a good bachelor's-degree's-worth of gas-guzzler—these are details in play. They will tell you this: Sebastian LaCroix has an iron fist and a fat account. And those things parts seas, even among Kindred. The glister of money inspires confidence in Board investors where his age and his height sometimes do not. And so westward-leaning real estate serves a purpose by being exactly what it is: a cocky, Right Wing corner of California, a safe house inside a precinct known for its violence, its fires, and its vehement left. With every land gain like this, a few square feet of culture return to a city Elders still call new blood. Because, in the old-money circles, LA is still America's rough-edged up-and-comer—it's a burial site for an old don, a Domain that reeks of Anarch. That's a reputation Sebastian cannot permit. Not in the dangerous limbo of Kuei-jin vanguards and battle drums. And certainly not while his name is plastered here in spinning neon light.

Ms. Woeburne was mildly surprised when Mira Luciana made her entrance, fifteen minutes late but no worse-for-wear. The Ventrue had been expecting an effete, over-sexed Mafia tart (Mr. LaCroix's phrase "predispositions and reservations" came to mind). Reality was conservative, a woman of average stature garbed in businesslike black. A thick, rich russet head of hair had been cut short at the Giovanni's ears, then slicked back with oil; while the dress was plain, diamonds glittered at her neck and wrists. Lip-liner exaggerated childish features; alarming white nails regained the lost age. Glossy, stygian eyes with curled lashes and aggressive pupils scanned the room before a hostess pointed her toward S.W.'s discreet table-for-two.

"Prince LaCroix's aide?" she asked immediately, sliding around a waiter. Her voice was coarse, contemporary and very American; it did not pander to the lilting speech cinema generally stamped upon Sicilian heiresses. It was not at all what Prince LaCroix's Aide had imagined. She stood politely.

"I am. Ms. Woeburne," the Foreman assured. They shook hands firmly across the untouched bread basket. Rye nestled prettily alongside sourdough and nut-speckled wheat. Woeburne's suit sleeves had been freshly steamed. "I'm glad to make your acquaintance. You must be Ms. Giovanni."

"Mira," she said only, and scooted up to join her. S.W. noted with a twist of dislike how Mira planted her elbows firmly upon their tablecloth—strike one—and the Ventrue winced for old-fashioned table manners. Manners, even now. A pinch at the back of the knuckle, a tap-tap on behind her neck. When love and joy were strained, there were still manners, drilled into her by a mother who could not afford (literally; in the financial sense; a tutor in Leeds who could not _afford_ to look as brown as she was) to look less imperial.

Never mind the nit-picking. It was a victory—or, at least, it was better than dealing with a Hendon house of Joelle Lefevres, those who postured their stereotypes, like blending in with humans was a Miss Nation pageant. Woeburne manufactured a smile, glancing over her glasses. She leant upon the table's edge, pressing fingerpad-to-fingerpad, muscle memory that copied all the stern planners she knew. "Well, Mira. The Prince sends his regards. He regrets not being here in-person, but the mob waits for no man, I'm afraid."

She grinned, a mild, crispy gesture her associate returned. It was an uneasy treaty packed with centuries of being mutually ignored.

"Don't I know it," the Giovanni joked.

They were both adjusted to meet-and-greets by now. Elders do not condescend to chat with ancillae face-to-face, and lineage aside, these two were of similar status; they were modern chips off an ancient Second Estate. Mira smelled of thyme and primrose. Ms. Woeburne was a new, mean leaf.

"I'm sure you have dealings elsewhere, so I won't keep you very long." It was S.W.'s polite code for wanting to leave. Her palm pushed aside the small china cup of gelato she'd ordered to make Cavoletti's wait staff leave her alone. It was a melted caramel puddle. One blunt lilac nail pointed at a manila envelope tucked safely under the Giovanni's arm. "Am I right to assume that is the item of business?"

Mira nodded, patting her parcel. "You bet it is," she promised. The informality threw Ms. Woeburne a minor loop. Ventrue are, you know by now, a little stuck (and a little stuck-up) in the lingo of death. No room for romanticism, few anachronisms, no patience for what Sebastian LaCroix calls "Dracula sentimentality"—but diction is another matter. (Your Ventrue would be an English major, wouldn't she.) "I've got the forms printed out, marked with the price we agreed on this morning. And I've brought the photographs Mr. LaCroix asked for. Three copies, all fresh. You wouldn't believe what I had to do to get my hands on these." The Giovanni rolled her vast, dark eyes. S.W. did not want to know what a vampire whose bloodline thrives upon incest and necrophilia considers distasteful. "Just make sure he keeps a foot in the door for me, will you?"

The Foreman's bottom eyelids crinkled—a little superiority, a little malice, a little of the prickly stuff all Ventrue have. It is just enough to put you on edge. It is just enough of nothing to make everything uncomfortable, even when they smile, say yes, and take your hand. "Without a doubt."

Ms. Woeburne scooted aside the useless bread hutch to accept Mira's documents. She glanced its provisions over only for appearances, then swept her John Hancock in swift, squarish, modest print. Mr. LaCroix hadn't said to haggle. There's no point; the Giovannis deal in obscene bills, and if you're of the mind to bribe them, you'll bring political gambits, not cash.

 _"Don't let the raw numbers dazzle you."_ Sure.

As promised, Mira replaced the thin stack of paper with her envelope. The young woman's bulky black earrings clinked. "Everything's there," she swore. "Glad to do business with you. I'd top it off with a cappuccino if we could, but since we can't… it's probably better if I don't hang around. Say hello to your Prince for me."

"Of course."

"Thanks, then. I think that's all."

With nothing more to offer, the Giovanni stood, her payment folded between two fingers. A brief dip of the head was this practical creature's only goodbye. For once in her life, Ms. Woeburne did not bother getting up.

But Mira didn't seem to notice, or mind. She was a younger creature than the stiff ancilla who took her forms and photos. Quickly, the latter saw, are old masters made. "I've already said this," Giovanni said, "but I might as well say it again. It's my hope our transaction proves this clan is eager to do its part for a stronger Los Angeles. Because I am. And we are. The arrangements have all been very promising, so know that I, personally, look forward to the next step. I'm glad to work with the Camarilla. And I'm glad to know what I can do for it in return."

"I'm sure Mr. LaCroix feels the same way. Goodnight."

They shook farewell. Envelope resting safely in her lap, the Foreman waited ten minutes after Ms. Giovanni's departure before she, too, left Café Cavoletti. She stirred the ruined dessert with a teaspoon. She laid out a three dollar tip.

Ms. Woeburne, gathering her purse, paused for a moment to study the innocuous-looking package they'd come here to exchange. It didn't appear suspicious, dressed in a boring yellow pouch suitable for office fare. The contents weren't awkwardly-shaped or poking strange angles. Whatever sat inside must've been succinct. She thought a ridge of Polaroid graced her fingertip, but couldn't be sure without checking.

Which Ms. Woeburne was not going to do.

It would've been simple enough to pop open the metal wings and stick her finger inside. The parcel was not laminated shut or otherwise glued down; there was likely no way Mr. LaCroix could find out she'd peeked. Not without Dominating her into confession, at least, and he was (generally) too sophisticated for such crass, Constantinian moves.

And it was a petty reason why she felt so curious—a spiny, immature, sour girl reason to pout. However immature or sour, the fact of the matter is: there aren't many things Prince Los Angeles censors from Ms. Woeburne. Sebastian had Sired her so that he might have a records room confidant—someone he could rely upon unswervingly, to trust with his documents, to write passes and be unafraid of father-eating corporate ambition. Perhaps it was not the most glamorous job. Being a Seneschal would've granted her more popularity and more credit; she was a clerk, not an analyzer, arguer or expert. But S.W. was very proud of her quiet life as Mr. LaCroix's personal registrar. When intel was too sensitive to filter down the usual vine, it went straight to Ms. Woeburne. When a formal title made other underlings too haughty depend upon, he called upon Ms. Woeburne to hold it all in check. She was not just any party subordinate—she was his legitimate progeny—and Sebastian no sooner expected Ms. Woeburne would betray him than his tower crumble.

Which was, again, why Ms. Woeburne had no intention of ever failing that confidence.

But it was, occasionally, tempting.

Sometimes S.W. fancied that she knew Prince LaCroix better than anyone else. Perhaps this wasn't saying very much, but it meant a great deal to his corporal. Sebastian's speech was carefully measured—whether it was chiding a rival or cajoling a peer—but a Sire needn't tread eggshells around a good Childe. She came and went from his private properties with little to no advance notice; she enjoyed nearly universal clearance to whatever files she might've needed for reference, cleaning, or deletion. It was an immense amount of trust to place in a young vampire. And he had asked only one thing in return.

 _"If we were to enter this arrangement, you and I, I would require, above all else, your loyalty."_ Mr. LaCroix had said so many years ago to a promotion-hungry, clueless, and regrettably human S.W. She could not possibly have guessed what it was on the table. You would not have, either. No one can. _"You will not question my orders, second-guess what I ask of you, or share our business with anyone. To be frank with you, Ms. Woeburne, you will do remarkably little without seeking my approval. Understand the demands of these privileges, as I have. They are not small demands. And they are nonnegotiable. So, please, tell me honestly. Can you do this?"_  
  
She supposed her answer was obvious.

 _Yes_ is what you are supposed to say.

So: yes. Even though it seemed foolish to keep secrets from his own soldier, who had never deceived him—even though it might've tweaked her just the smallest, most insignificant bit—dereliction was not an option. Dutiful agents do not require explanations. If Sebastian said "Do not open the envelope," S.W. would not open the damn envelope.

But holding it up to a bare lightbulb was a different story entirely.

And this was precisely what our good soldier did during her drive home.

The Audi R8 proved to be a lackluster reading light, but Ms. Woeburne—who'd in life been (please forgive her this pun) blind as a bat—was assisted by many years of late nights and tiny text. She popped the plastic off an overhead with her dashboard pocketknife, clicked it on, and squinted. Neat lettering peered around several indecipherable photographs. The paper was frail, permeable, and might've otherwise revealed quite a lot.

But unfortunately—predictably—Mr. LaCroix had thought of that, too. A layer of black cardboard had been flattened around the documents, rendering them useless to her. Ms. Woeburne could make out only the blurry, unhelpful beginning of a title: _Recovery Progress on the—_

And typeface choked short on a big, dense box.

S.W. gave up with a snort. _'It figures.'_

It figuring, Ms. Woeburne decided she'd tampered enough. She snapped the fixture back into place, twisted the key into the ignition, and drove to Venture Tower with Gehenna in her lap.


	34. Bloody Brothers

Colton King smashed a boot into the garbage bin, right hand holding whatever was left of his face.

Rats upended out of the tin—furry, fat bodies, exploding from cardboard sandwich cartons and crumpled newspaper. Candy wrappers tinkled out; soda bottles leaked. Clothing flopped over in cotton-fiber tumbleweeds. Funny that, even when the trashcan started rolling back and forth, rattling along the asphalt, it was still a feeding ground. He figured there had to be a metaphor there.

Colton wasn't a poet, so he wasn't sure how or why—or which way would be the best way to put this—but sometimes, cut out on his own beneath nights like these, the man would look up, get his dark-sight caught in the smog, and swear they all were lilting just like that, tipping back-and-forth. His hands would toss out and his knees buck, just once, expecting a shift, for something to move. But it never did. It never moved. Things always pitched too far one way, and momentum sent them teetering back, until everything came to a stand-still. Then his brothers would find him again. Someone would find him, or he would go limping—dragging one forward then the other one—back home, like all of them did.

That's how his people survive. They would all rush out of the den to claim things, to carry food off in meaty bits, each chewing up what she could before the family came to carve up their dues. You have to scarf quickly if you are going to get anything for yourself. He knows that. He knew what he looked like. He looked like that spooked raccoon at the lip of the upturned can, an overgrown rodent, braving its fear of loud noises to run off with half a ballpark frank. He looked like mice scattered with popcorn kernels in pin-prickle teeth. He looked like one old soldier opossum—a mangled snout with miserable, watery pupils pushed deep inside—that hissed, pathetically, as someone's cat made away clutching its lunch.

If LA was a kicked-over can, Colt figured he was the goddamn possum.

The Gangrel's healing shoulder squealed worse than any of those animals did. Tissues blossomed into a dozen shades of yellow, reminding him where the bullet crunched through it several nights ago. He'd been squeezing out muscle knots in sharp, smarting shifts. And all that broken skin had pretty much restitched itself by this point. The bone was a problem. It continued to throb beneath everything else. It roiled, sobbing, as calcium bled slowly back into pistol holes. King's eyes went brackish and threatened to well up every time he tried to rotate it.

He'd grown himself half a beard these past few nights, hollow cheeks sprouting thatches of brown-red-black, body too sore to bother being shaved. The facial hair hid old, crocodilian scars over a narrow, vulpine chin. Steel welder's hands, fisherman's profile, where you could see the bumpy path of a jaw rumble into his neck. Thin lips rested tightly across a mouth full of shredding teeth. Thick, straight eyebrows and curly stubble clashed with the copper of his mane. Worn leather stiffened with dried blood. Colt had this crusty inkling that he was beginning to look like a coyote, a drunkard, or a hybrid of both, but he couldn't quite make himself care. Not tonight. He had too much carrying-off to do. He was in too much slinking pain.

Colton had known Marcus would be raving pissed. Marcus Torres was a Brujah—short-fuse-plus-Potence variety—and qualified as 'raving pissed' a good eighty-five percent of the time, more or less. But the Ductus had torn his ear off—tore his goddamn, motherfucking _ear off_ —leaving ragged, bloody flesh beneath all that auburn shag. And for what? King was a foot-soldier, but now he was useless, whimpering around with a fist-sized hole in his head. He did it because this was penance, a light blood price. He did it because two fledges caught a death on one of his beats. He did it because—like always, like somebody always said—King fucked something up, and he did it mercilessly, and he did it poor.

It wasn't as simple as that and it wasn't as easy to scrape along in LA. But Colton's block on the totem pole was a low one—and his face, a foot soldier's face, was a gross snarl. These are the deplorable people. They're those people who disgust others because there is nothing left in this belly-crawl spot of the pecking order to disgust them. Some call them shovelheads. Theirs is the hallmark of creatures with no room for nuance or mercy. Theirs is the foulest mouthful of shriveled, rancid roast beef from the bottom of the garbage bin.

Anarchs always _you-people._ They talk big. They Cossack around on the highest of high-stepping horses, flat-fisting old drums, slapping their crops and eyeballing you like everyone else is some kind of neat fucking hivemind. But they don't know you. There's too much idealism with the State. These aren't Ventrue—they aren't builders or fixers or engineers. These are burners, breakers, stompers, and bombers. They have too many dreamers and too much violence in their dreams. Anarchy can't bother to make a footnote of every lip it busts—and it doesn't recall each possum a Baron singles out, douses in kerosene, and lets crackle inside the breast of some dank hidey-hole in Santa Fe.

The Free State doesn't care enough about this fact to notch it in their bedpost, but King had been shot by Rodriguez once before (though he doubted Rodriguez remembered him). It'd happened when Colt was a grime-ball greenhorn pup. Baron LA had a couple wolves at his back that night—eight or ten kids itching to sink their claws into a Public Enemy, too small for pissing on Camarilla affairs. They wanted some color of blood, any color, and if you intend on controlling this sort of army, you'd better give the Brujah their blood. So a squadron of Anarchs screeched up in four cars, no warning, no "get off my street"; they were just there. They shot up a block of Sabbat havens. Nobody important; just dormitories. They sprayed some gasoline, chucked a few molotovs. It started a fire that scorched them out of the warehouse. Torched a dozen neonates. Colton didn't think those Anarchs had set one foot inside. They had fired and smashed and smoked the façade of the sandy brick tenements until all the fledglings inside came choking out, shooting blindly, pissing their pants.

King wasn't brave or dumb enough to grab a rifle and stampede through the doors. He'd taken one sniff of that gas and knew it was time to get the fuck out. So he did. He skedaddled up two floors, along spooky hallways lit by knotholes (and now bullets), dashing for the ribs of the house. The Gangrel, aware of his mortality, tried to stay in cover but that was a losing game. He caught a nine millimeter in his hip while running down a barricade of plywood slatted over hoary windows. He'd felt the nip, the crunch, but kept loping. He kept moving, soles clapping harder and faster against the scummy tile of that place, shell casings roaring up dust, until he jumped from a fire escape banister to another building. Then another, then another. And then he sat in some mildewed basement like a sad sack of shit, not sure whether to clutch his leg or his side, dog-whimpering, smelling brothers go up in flames.

It wasn't the first time he'd been shot. But it was the first time he'd ever been hit running away. The bullet burrowed right down to his bone and was hard to get out—fingers, tweezers, a piece of wire.

 _'Meth Lab Ignites in Intrastate Drug War'_ went the next morning's headlines. Ventrue cover-up, a good cleaning crew. LaCroix probably had to hand out a medal over that slaughterhouse. Rodriguez probably refused to accept it or acknowledge the common ground. It wasn't worth a fleeced-off sneeze—none of it. None of them, these shovelheads—these green, grimy pups fresh from the dirt; easy to kill, easy to bury, easy to leave—really were.

Seemed like only the opportunity to snipe some Sabbat gets everyone in the neighborhood working together. It didn't figure much to Colt most nights—Anarch or Camarilla, hobnail boot or English rider, brass knuckle or black tie. _Those-people_ are all the same pompousness and all the same disaster. Fuck Nines Rodriguez; fuck that stuttering, stuck-engine half-machine some idiot fledglings thought meant something real; fuck Marcus Torres, too, the hypocrite madmen that ran his gang and theirs. Colt didn't take it personally. He hated the Brujah for being what they were.

Anarchs blow up; that's a given; that's an item everybody understands. Some folks are skittish or slimy or star-struck enough to survive the Brujah. Some are just lucky sons-of-bitches, like Colton was. But his animosity for that clan, at its root, is not with Free-State demagogues, but with Marcus, downtown's local chapter-head and personal assistant to the Los Angeles Bishop. Best not to ask what Bishop Vick required a personal assistant for. Torres wouldn't whisper you a breath of that business, anyway; he gave you your orders short, nasty, and mean; and you followed his instructions if you liked your appendages where they were. Always had a hair trigger bad attitude. Had a tiny bit of belly looking soft over abdominal muscles that didn't unclench. Had eagle-eyes like an alcoholic marine, no smiles, and an uzi. Whatever Marcus had or didn't, have he took that militant image to heart. He sucked that soft inch of stomach in.

Chain-of-command means passing down the buck one rung for every hiccup in their operation. It goes up: meatheads to captains to Ductus to Bishop, and who knows where it came before Vick. What everyone knew was that Marcus handed out bad news out with a hatchet. He had a disciplinary code. Should have been a drill sergeant. Should have been a different kind of beast.

King had only seen the Bishop once. One time Vick came to the hotel, and they all listened to some kind of sermon in some kind of speech. But in that once, Colt got an itching, powdery feeling that Vick might've been a Brujah, too.

He'd watched the cycle of pain play out too many times.

He avoided the den all week. He hunted and slept in a sewer building on a beach. He'd belly-crawled back to Hallowbrook tonight, fully expecting a beating. But he had not anticipated their Ductus would yank an ear out of his head _and_ boot him, bleeding, curbside to stumble off somewhere else. _'It's not my fuck up. None of it's mine,'_ the Gangrel had muttered outside a mildewed alley door. His jowls curled with the effort of not licking his wounds. A lost lobe over two overeager dipshits who were slow on the draw, and a failure to waste some dumb-faced thin-blood, whose existence offends those who'd been made better, made with something in mind.

Even a terrible thing is still a something. You had to give him that. You don't have a choice.

Colt ducked away from a passing police truck, haunches low beneath the buzz of bad streetlights. He wasn't sure why. He hadn't broken a law.

But his uninjured side was soaked. The coat stitches were swelling, hide slick with head blood. You could almost taste the city smog. It was oddly sweet with palm leaves, like cream melting over rocks; it would be a hot dawn, humid and uncomfortable. Finding a cool place to sleep was going to be a pain. But he wasn't about to go creeping back to their pack, heavy with shame—not until these cracks in his jaw bone sealed, the ear stopped dribbling, or until the Ductus went elsewhere for a time. If King showed his face there before Torres calmed down, he'd gladly twist off the other ear. It wouldn't surprise Colton.

It wouldn't surprise Colton if that frothing son-of-a-bitch keeps the ears—a wall of shovelhead parts, tanned and tacked up in a frosty basement somewhere. King once bullied the door of a heroin pusher back home who did something like that. Bastard had a freezerful of thumbs he'd whack off clients who couldn't meet their interest rates. When he wanted to scare somebody, he'd have Colt drag them over by the hair and give 'em a good look. They'd always start snotting and blubbering real good. He remembered wanting to hurt them. Or maybe it was the dealer he wanted to hurt—or maybe himself—but which didn't really matter, then or now. That bubble of hate ballooned outward, and hate was always the same.

It was all a long time, of course, before he'd been turned over. That was before King had been torque wrenched by some could've-been-anybody Sire, bitten and buried, then left to claw his way out of the summer gravel on Guntersville Lake.

Eight years. Like most anybody with half-a-brain, Colt thought 'Camarilla pathos' and 'Anarch passion' translated into two steaming loads of bullshit that smelled about the same. But they were right about one very particular thing: Being born into the Sabbat was bad luck. And it hurt you. It hurt like everything, like a dream collapsing in.

Hurting, embarrassed and tired, Colton wandered the cramped allies outside Central LA for maybe an hour before finding a building to settle down. It was a little too close to Rodriguez's border for a good place to sleep. But it was quiet, it was dense, and it was far-off from home without getting too far.

Colt squeezed in through the service door of a condemned garage, one of those old-style ones for paranoid dealers, bar-locks on the entrance and windows plated in tin. It was populated, sort of. It wasn't empty, and it wasn't free, but scaring some toothless bums or dope-shooters or street kids from their nook is simple business.

There were only three. Two caught a glimpse of Colton and cleared out before having to be asked, not even bothering to douse their trashcan burn or ask "who's that?" The last man was passed out in an Army Surplus sleeping bag. Colt grabbed that cooling body without waking it and drained its throat. There was no fight inside of him, merely a hand that pawed woozily, then fainted before ever touching the vampire's face. Cheapshit rum flushed down the veins to his heart, secondhand drunkness. It left King picking lint from his teeth and made his mouth filmy. The alcohol tasted disgusting but its dullness was nice. No one would miss him. Colt rolled his body outside.

"Community service," the Gangrel huffed, dumping the cadaver into an unbolted manhole. He listened for its impotent _'ploosh!'_ before padding back inside.

It was a decent hideout, his temporary nest. King kicked the homeless fire barrel out, chained both metal sliding-doors shut, and gingerly stretched his aching body across cold concrete. Urban depression smelled and felt familiar. Rest would heal his body, though; who cared what the shed stunk like? It was sealed and lightless and unwantable. He'd be safe to sleep here, providing he could relax enough. The now vacant sleeping bag was crawling with lice and urine. Colt preferred the floor.

He wondered who was leading the patrols tonight. He scratched at the ragged skin of his ear.

"Nothing better to do with my time," Colton admitted, because no one could hear him, and he turned over against the cement. Talking made him feel a little better. His shoulder stung squashed up on the ground. His voice sounded irritable and full of conviction; there were no brothers to snap back at him, to tear his clumsy words apart. Most nights he feels their pull—back to the pack, says the blood, back to your family. But sometimes it is better to be alone. Alone, where he could close his eyes and breathe and let the air tickle all the wet parts inside his chest. That was the Gangrel blood. It told him to unsettle himself, roam far, keep walking, find a haven at a distance and fish for food.

Maybe tomorrow night he would go hunting. Tonight, he was still hurt.

Colton had pent-up oxygen, he noticed, somersaulting inside his lungs, and let it out in one big whoosh. The tightness of his muscles and the truth of his boredom made shallow wounds tingle all over again. He could feel the booze making him stupid. He wanted to nap. He wanted to get up and run. He pillowed his scalp upon a coat sleeve, and wanted, and tried to play dead.

And he lay there, awake, through morning— bleeding slowly, disturbed by a frisson of doom he could not explain.


	35. Dependants

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: RODERICK DUNN**  
**DATE:  JULY 1, 2010 11:27 PM**  
**SUBJECT: THANK YOU & MUCH OBLIGED**

Dear Ms. Woeburne,

 

Sincere thanks for your grudging but benevolent intervention in regards to the small situation with a certain Harpy. And none too soon, if the final message they left me is any indication. The bunch of us here at Hendon—mostly me, but by extension, Shauna and the rest—are humbly grateful for the save. I’m relieved, really.

I’m aware of your (understandable) concerns with the limitations of remote management, but I have some measure of confidence in my promise that this problem won’t be a Two Act. Your signature on that missive seems to have done the trick. I don’t expect any apologies or other miraculous faire from the offending parties, but our good friend Iva Charlotte has backed off dramatically, which is a godsend in itself. It’s a matter of time before she puzzles out you’re still overseas and not waiting in the lounge for her with a firepoker and an LA subpoena; I’m sure she’ll no doubt come knocking just as soon-as. But I’ll have figured out something long-term solution-wise by then, I swear.

(Maybe we could fix a poster board of you in the window. Sort of a scarecrow arrangement. Ha ha ha.)

So long as I’m already pestering you about estate business, I might as well give you a report en breve. No news is good news on the general front.

 

  * I’ve rotated the patrol lineup, as per your suggestion, which hasn’t as of yet caused too much grumbling from the staff.
  * Ms. Maldano informs me the financial readouts are back in the yellow, but she must know more about it than I do; her quarterly analysis is due to me in approx. three weeks. I will forward this to you purely for your viewing pleasure, unless you tell me otherwise. (If anything stands out, your commentary is also welcome, but not expected.)
  * The only other point of note concerns Shauna’s domain. She’s in the middle of making security conference arrangements and asked me how she should go about determining speaker priority, because she’s afraid to ask you. I believe she’s currently arranged it by seniority, but is considering switching to specialty groupings. No word yet on what those groupings may be. I told her I’d let her know if you have an opinion you’re willing to pass on.



 

The dues collectors are an ongoing saga, of course, but this particular item I think we’ve unofficially put to bed. Here’s hoping.

Until that night, thank you again—profusely, if I’m not being crystal-clear—for buying me some time.

Also: Happy Independence Day! You’re a certifiable Yank now, am I wrong?

(Sorry.)

 

RODERICK DUNN  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
HENDON ESTATES

 

* * *

 

 

 **TO: RODERICK DUNN**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE:  JULY 2, 2010 4:03 AM**  
**SUBJECT: RE: THANK YOU & MUCH OBLIGED**

Roderick:

 

All’s well. Am content to know the intervention was of some assistance to you. Will forward angry picture of my eyeball to post over the front door peephole. Make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Please tell Shauna the first option is sufficient.

Happy America.

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES


	36. In Neutral

When Lily showed up to work that night, brain in her head and shoes on her feet, Ms. Woeburne caught her by surprise.

“I got you a present,” said the vampire, abruptly, standing up all at once from her paper-piled desk. She had clearly been waiting. She was a little bit on eggshells, rising there in her tough lines and dry-cleaned, somber black.

As you can probably imagine, Lily was muddled. She stepped fully into the unpleasantly cool apartment and shut the door behind her; her blank-faced look migrated sluggishly from stupefaction to confusion to suspicion, right on the precipice of alarm. You’d be suspicious getting presents from Ms. Woeburne, too. “You, um. You did? For, uh. For what?”

There had been nothing in her boss’s terse hello over the intercom five minutes ago to suggest anything out of the ordinary was underway up here. Just the buzzer, the elevator music, and the long hall. Lily could feel herself blinking, feel the emptiness stuttering inside her head. Not a present-present, probably. Not, like, a gift. It was likely a smart, chipper way to inform her of a business arrangement or another meeting, or maybe something Ms. Woeburne had gotten her out of, somehow. She hoped it was that. She hoped she wouldn’t have to go up Venture Tower, into the gold-on-white room under that immense chandelier, ever again.

Whatever it really meant, there was no way to play this one off cool. Lily unzipped her jean jacket, needlessly worn (it was pretty warm out) and needlessly undone (she wasn’t too hot). She let her purse slip slowly—as one does when they’re trying not to upset an animal—down one arm to the gray carpet. The overheads were always too dramatic in here. There were a couple broken orange tendrils caught on the strap buckle and they suddenly leapt out like wire.

Ms. Woeburne was standing there before the shut-off computer with a soldierly comportment—pomp and dark, square shoulders, hands behind her back. The vampire never looked happy, exactly. But she looked excited to say—like she was doing her best to pin some anxious, heroic tenor sort of reveal down. If Lily’s hesitation at all deflated her, there was no sign of it. “Fourth of July present,” she announced, figuring.

The girl made the least skeptical face that she could. But her brows started screwing up and her mouth corner twitched and she was ninety percent sure she blew it. “Is that even a thing?”

“Well, it is now. Come on—hand out,” Ms. Woeburne tutted. She shimmed out around the brutal desk edge, not bothering to tuck in the chair (which was a little unusual for her), and then the Ventrue was right before Lily. She beheld her with an alert, zippy expectation, like a house bird does when it’s proud of itself. And then, after a moment of suspense, she extended both her balled fists as though to give the fledgling a choice.

The offer was real, but the arms in their suit sleeves were still so stiff. She had probably never lost a stray hair in her life.

“Open up,” Ms. Woeburne said. “Pick one.”

More than somewhat dumbfounded at this point, Lily took the necessary steps forward, feeling the extension of her hamstrings and the resistance of her knees. She picked at random held out her palm face-up.

“First try,” Ms. Woeburne told her, eyelids crinkling. Then she opened the chosen fist and there was a weighty smack of metal into Lily’s palm.

“Keys,” she observed, because duh. They were cold and jarring in the cup of her hand as it hovered there, unsure what to do now.

“Car keys,” agreed Ms. Woeburne. She was brisk and as pleased with herself as a Ventrue with a red-headed stepchild could be. A tap-tap of the vampire’s cool fingertips closed up Lily’s slow palm, a clam around a pearl. “In the garage,” she added when nothing happened fast enough. “It’s yours. Happy Independence.”

Lily stalled out.

Inarticulation:

“Mine—you didn’t. Ms. Woeburne. Ms. Woeburne, no. You didn’t get me a—?” Except the protest wasn’t birthday denial, and it wasn’t teenage enthusiasm. In the girl’s glossy, dead-fish stare: all dismay.

Which Ms. Woeburne didn’t seem to pick up on right away—or maybe she didn’t much care. Ventrue perceive problems and solve them. They don’t waste time imagining alternates or consulting beneficiaries when the answer is plain to them, and this one was plain to her. As plain as the black eye on Lily had been, all those nights ago. As plain as a cowboy boot applied to the guts. As plain as the passenger seat of a truck. “I did. Nissan—it’s a hybrid. Nothing flashy. Navy, I’m afraid. But it does what you need it to do,” she promised. “It will get you off the streets, won’t it.”

Lily brought the keys gingerly toward her chest to take a closer look, cupping them over-carefully, like you might with a handful of yolks. Or sand. She was utterly put-on-the-spot. She demurred.

“But I’m—Ms. Woeburne. No way. This is way too much. I mean, whose boss—? You can’t. I’m not—”

“I can,” the vampire informed her, a little snappish now, that razor burn coldness lancing in. She did not like being told by a child what she could and could not do. “Clearly, I can.”

Lily was dumbstruck. Literally—her hands were going numb. There was a rockiness tumbling in the thin-blood’s stomach, gathering pebbles and sharp bits of shell every second; this could go either way, and if it went one of them, she thought she might cry. How can you refuse something like this from someone like her? Why would she cry?

“But—” It was all she had at this point. It was also the truth: “I’m not licensed.”

The Ventrue frowned. It brought her hard-edged brows a stitch closer above the intense black of her collar fold. Like military school, you might think, if you’d never been. She was all police academy, even when giving out gifts. “I already told you I took care of that.”

“No, not—I mean,” Lily backed it up. “Driver’s license.”

That principal’s frown changed its nature. It wasn’t annoyed anymore—it was more of a regimented, diligent consideration of fact. But there the hard edges remained. What would a soldier be, if you took those away?

Oh, she said.

Well, she said.

“I’ll have to teach you,” Ms. Woeburne said, deciding right then-and-there, that’s-that.

“Uh. No. No, no—you don’t have to do that,” Lily tried, not knowing what else there was to do about it, but sure this was not her idea of an ideal teacher, and beyond sure she wasn’t about to ask an undead politician for any extra time.

“Nonsense. I’m running early, anyway. Thirty minutes,” Ms. Woeburne figured, glancing perfunctorily at her wrist watch. It disappeared back beneath the sleeve with a silvery clack. And then she was striding forward, portfolio bag slung over one shoulder, to the door. “Come on. Let’s take a look. I’ll give you the beginner’s course on my way out.”

And she snatched up the abandoned purse to fork over, and its owner took it, and because Lily could think of no other no-thanks excuse, they were down the hallway and down the elevator and down the rows of the Empire Arms parking garage.

The car itself was as described. She’d parked it—or had it parked—on the first floor, several safe places in. This year’s Altima sedan came in a brackish blue, with spotless windows and a clean, unused interior. (Like Ms. Woeburne had ever bought anything used. She was definitely a mint-condition, hot-off-the-press person. She was not the type to trust her tools secondhand.) The wheels were turned a stabilizing touch to the left. The charcoal leather had never been creased or spilled on. Lily peeked into the passenger side through a visor of her curled hands.

“Well, what do you think.” The Ventrue stopped behind her. You could tell where she was standing from the click-stop of her low-heeled boots on the pavement. It was cool in here—echoing, still, floodlit. No matter how expensive your car or how upscale your hotel, though, you couldn’t keep that slight scent of oil and old rainwater out of the concrete. In times and spaces like these—space-time Ms. Woeburne would sometimes refer to as liminal, but what phrasebook that was from, who knew—there was always the suggestion of abandonment, like drip-drip-drip. “Budget vehicle, obviously. I didn’t want to use the company account for this. For obvious reasons.”

Lily unmade her hands. She didn’t turn around right away. She stood, looking, and clutched her fingers together tight, until the squeeze of the knuckles just began to sting. “I can’t believe you bought me a car. What do I even say?”

Ms. Woeburne’s reflection was just a dark silhouette in the glass. If you looked closely, you could almost see the suggestion of face—lines, only. “Well. To begin with. How about: hop in? Go on,” she added when Lily did not straightaway move. “You’re on the wrong side.”

It took a moment for Lily to react and unlock. She circled the car, hearing the step-in and shut of her patron landing shotgun. For an instant after, with Ms. Woeburne out of sight and no human sounds to speak of, the thin-blood felt she was alone. Completely alone—in space, and in time. Liminal. The word brought a sense of freedom in the humid garage, with these lamps and this silence and wet spots on the ground. It brought a tiny beat of her own power, of openness. And of dread on its heels, just inside there, waiting. Which was scarier, Schrodinger?: If there was a monster in the seat, or if she opened the door and it was only Lily, here by herself?

She never came up with an answer. Ms. Woeburne got tired of waiting, leaned over, and pushed her palm heel into the horn. Lily came back to the curt beep-beep. She opened up and got in.

You know already what new car smells like. But you might know less about the feeling of nerves that comes with being observed by a Ventrue—or any vampire, really—when there is only so much wiggle room and only so many places you can go. Ms. Woeburne sitting beside her as not an unheard-of phenomenon, but the circumstances were. Lily did not feel particularly in-charge. She put the keys into the ignition and twisted, remembering at least that much; in her peripherals, slanted light rinsed glasses lenses of the color and lashes beneath them. The other woman cleared her throat. It was a bracing, expectant, but slightly more human noise. And there weren’t many of those to be had tonight. You had to see the familiar in her where you could get it.

“All right, then. Let’s see what you’ve got. Take us around the garage a few times; if you blow it, I’ll correct you. I’ll fix your bad habits. Then you can go off on your own.”

It seemed like it should take more than that. Lily’s arms felt weak, like fishbones, when she gripped the wheel. The kind of fishbones so frail and cooked-through you don’t even have to take them out. Sardines. ‘Why do you think I’ve been putting this off?’ she wanted to say, and wanted to sweat out her apprehension. Old, no-frills, mortal apprehension that had not grown and had not changed.

But it had changed. It had in some way, right? Because this wasn’t Mom or Uncle with her leaner’s permit pinched between two fingers and vacant promises of “Sit up tall and breathe, honey; lightning doesn’t strike twice.” This was Ms. Woeburne. Ms. Woeburne would think all of her reasons very irrelevant and superstitious. Ms. Woeburne would not ask why she never got her license. Lily almost wished she would. Because without being asked, she couldn’t find a way to tell anyone about that bygone accident—or how it felt so final and so guilty rolling over on a grassy country shoulder in the thin crunch of new snow—or how she always kind of hated seeing deer after that—or how, for a half-second of terror as her brain had scrambled to register it was upside-down, she’d glanced over at her mother’s face and knew—even if it was wrongly—that she’d killed her.

Well, Ms. Woeburne would have said. You didn’t. Did you.

“I can’t believe you did this,” Lily told her, heavy about it, a little bit doomed.

“You had an issue.” She sat back stiffly in the leather seat, relaxing without being relaxed, and looked out the window to the lined-up cars. Ms. Woeburne said it nonchalantly, directly, without humbleness or excess. It was the way another person might tell you she’d gone ahead and brought you your coat, no trouble, here it is. “This fixes your issue.”

Lily couldn’t tell Ms. Woeburne she didn’t want this quick-fix—mostly because she wasn’t sure if she did or not—so instead of talking, her hands clammy as ever, the driver backed up. They rolled easily out of the space. Her sneaker toe was touchy on the brake, and it was obvious this irritated her passenger, but nobody mentioned it. A few squeaky turns around the complex, and they were heading up. Floor-by-floor; an elderly woman stepped out of an elevator, and a well-dressed man sitting in an SUV was yelling into his cell. Before long, they reached the top of the garage, and the only way to go was back down.

“See,” Ms. Woeburne said. It was more like the know-it-all see than the see of encouragement, but Lily forced an embarrassed smile anyway. She felt all the fine hairs standing up on her legs, and the gooseflesh under her shirt. “You drive. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Not, you know. In the city.” She tested the windshield wipers. They swept by once—on and off. “I still don’t have a license. What do I do if I get pulled over?”

“Then don’t get pulled over,” the Ventrue said, strong brows hopping, there-you-have-it. Clearly.

Lily glanced at the dashboard clock. Terrified that Ms. Woeburne would direct her out on the street and terrified that she wouldn’t—that she’d cut her thin-blood loose with a fifteen-minute concourse around a nighttime lot—she forgot about real-world laws for a while.

Maybe this vampire thing was as easy as that.

“Should I try—don’t know. Parking, or something?”

“Hm? Oh. Right. Yes, do that, definitely. No, no. Not there; that’s a simple one. See if you can’t squeeze into the last spot by the column. That’s the way.”

Lily did so, jimmying in-and-out of the increasingly more awkward spaces spied by Ms. Woeburne. It was coming back in bits and pieces. Like riding a bike, she thought, tongue dry. Like muscle memory. For having just given someone what was hands-down the most expensive gift of their life—did she even realize? She had to, didn’t she? Was she on that different of a plane?—the Ventrue was a markedly disinterested instructor. There was a far-off web of nerves thatched just under her skin. You could always see the tension there; you couldn’t always see her mind wandering through her eyes, focused on some finish line or safe zone out of everyone else’s sight. She stopped Lily a few times to straighten up her reverse angle or to inform her of a sloppy approach, but that was all. If an actual obstacle came up, you had to wonder—would she just snap right back and dodge it, let her body takeover like a predatory animal does? Or would she get caught blindsided like a regular person? Would they both have crashed?

“You’re not doing too badly. I’ll need to go in soon. Why don’t you drop me off at my car and head up,” Ms. Woeburne suggested. Then, absently, as the turn signal flashed on with unnecessary carefulness and the accelerator eased down too gingerly: “Odd not to drive in LA, isn’t it. You couldn’t buy something used?”

“Yeah, I guess. I don’t really know. I haven’t been in California very long.”

“Oh?” Out of obligation, probably. Out of social contract. But whatever it was out of, here came the question Lily—having known Ms. Woeburne months now—never expected she’d ever be asked: “Where were you from? Before this. Obviously.”

“Way north. Oregon. I came out here for school.”

“Ah,” she said, as though now everything made sense. “A Portlander. Of course.”

She wasn’t from Portland. She was from the country. The County, with capital letters and outside dogs and horses and rednecks, where everybody really did drive, because there was barely even a bus to carry you. But Lily didn’t correct her—she was too busy waiting to be corrected, herself. And, by the time those glasses were window-facing again, the moment was over. It was just the back of a bob-cut, black in these lights. Her interest was gone.

But then she said: “I’m not, either. From the city. This one, anyway. But you knew that,” Ms. Woeburne remembered, hesitating strangely, coughing to clear her already empty throat.

And Lily felt very sad for a moment. She looked at Ms. Woeburne’s palm heel propped up under her chin and at her elbow on the door rest, and she felt like maybe it wasn’t such a different plane, when you think about it. Maybe there are a couple of things that really do trickle-down.

“Hey,” Lily said. Thanks. Thank you. I mean it. A lot.

She sounded a little chilly. Like normal—like her usual less-charitable, heel-toe self. “I hope it’s a help.”

“It is. It’s—this is—huge. I’m totally freaked out. Still way too much. But you didn’t have to, and you did. And thank you,” Lily swore, bringing the car to jerky, no-license stop. “For giving a damn. About me. What happens to me. It doesn’t seem like ‘thank you’ is enough.”

Ms. Woeburne crinkled one of her tissue paper smiles. “It’s something,” she said, and patted the airbag, and got out.

And then she was in her own white car and pulling away, into the city that they didn’t come from. And then the night was wide open. And then Lily—by herself—eked into the left-behind place.


	37. The Romulus Complex

Mira Giovanni sashayed through the foyer, bathrobe stuck to her ribs, moonlight on her hands, waiting patiently to hear her cousins die.

They'd been idiots to come here—just come running!—because she'd asked them to. Cousin Mira, a new superior, had a new request, she said. She dressed up her agenda like a family visit. And she was sure they would take one whiff of the cheese in this trap and never show.

But here they were. As though they would never have thought of being anywhere else.

Oh, there was more to it than good faith and poor danger sense, of course. Overtures had been made. Appeals and friendly phone calls padded these relationships three months in advance. Then, just evenings ago, she'd concocted some flimsy promises about bringing both men into the inner circle. _'Business associates,'_ had been the term, and its mediocrity made her snort between blunted, painful, uncompromising fangs.

Mira may have been young, but she'd never needed a cousin's help before.

 _Why now?_ might've crossed a smarter boy's mind.

She had planned a sometimes elegant, sometimes violent advancement through La Famiglia long before her first spit of blood beneath that sallow California moon. But it's on nights like this that Mira Luciana remembers it—that taste, that missed heartbeat, how it all meant the world. She remembered the weather: clear, sixty-two degrees, unseasonably cool for a late August night. She remembered the hand stuck in her hair, making her kneel beyond the lime trees in the backyard grove; remembered the dew, feeling like iodine where it seared into her skinned knees, wetness from the baby grass, through the stockings she wore. It was foul down her pipes like a kind of metal.

Uncle and two of her Aunts killed Mira. Ita and Severene—she remembered ivory pumps, a gold chain wrist watch, tonka bean cologne on a tulip pink suit. Severene, forty-eight at the time of death, styled up in a short blonde bouffant, the hand in her hair. Ita, thirty-eight, a foot of limp jet, an Italian cream dress, holding Mira's head in her hands after the Kiss. But it wasn't a kiss. They gave her a half-bottle of morphine and slit her throat. She remembered the cold burn, distant and annoying through a haze of drugs, like a torn cuticle across her jugular, as though it was happening a hundred miles away. Ita wiped the excess away with a house table napkin. Mira remembered the black ivy trefoil stitched on. She wiped away blood with one corner, and then she wiped spittle from her niece's mouth with another, Mira's jaws unhinged by an inch, wheezing out quietly, one long violin of a noise.

Mira, twenty-eight, pearls in her hair, a string broken off the bulge in a pretty long neck.

They did it just yards away from the kitchens in the immaculate, lawnmowered backyard. Sitting at a dish counter a few minutes earlier, her reflection looking back in stainless steel pots, she had a rudimentary idea of what was about to happen.

There had been no pretense at all. It happened after a seasonal party in a seasonless state. It was a red grape wine and wild pig sauce and a Cornish game hen. It was kisses and handshakes and too-long, too-close hugs. And as they all were leaving, a doorman with no name and a head like a brick over his scarlet tie said, lowly: _Cousin Mira, please follow me_. She followed him. She pushed into the same portholed door her aunts would tip-toe through and was confused to be there, empty and alone in a servant's space—but confused only as long as it took Ita to fling a champagne glass in the staff sink and smile back at her. When the syringe came out of Severene's overlarge purse, buckles clacking, Mira willingly rolled up her sleeve. It wasn't the first time. It wasn't the first time a Giovanni made a choice, or the first time a twinge in her elbow made deadness melt away. Exhale, she told herself; _exhale, Mira_.

They let her sit on the dose for a while. Then, when she began slumping forward, the aunts picked her up, one limp arm for each. And they walked her, digging fingernails, hissing _stand up; go along;_ _move, Mira_. The whoosh of citrus air from the lemon trees and cool grass under her feet, slipping from their heels. She thought Bruno's swollen hand was holding her hipbone from behind, but it was a memory; all of it became memories, eventually. She flinched at fourteen when he threw out her white leggings, striped this horrible, indescribable kind of pink; she watched her bank account at eighteen fill up with gifts and family boons like a real estate hawk; and that contrite girl, grown-up now, would not have felt so affectionate if he had been there. She wouldn't have felt like a little tugboat, being supported by warships. Her Aunts half-carried her the whole way. Uncle was standing outside with a machete.

Severene said the dirt would soak up the mess. So they sat her down right there, in the waning outdoor lights, and then Bruno's knuckles were tapping her flagging chin, so she kissed all his rings. It was ritual habit. They did whatever it was they did to her out in the clearing of spotless lawn and clean air. Mira shouldn't have been surprised by that.

Give it a decade or two, and the new ones—the little cousins—would begin calling her Aunt Mira. But this white lace girl did not want to be an Aunt, you see; she did not want the preface of love, bow-tied in a title; she wanted the name she was born with.

Mira is Mira. That is the way it's always going to be.

Another Aunt should have beaten her to this scheme. It perplexed her that none of them had—at least, none of them tried, not since she was old enough to remember all of her family. Perhaps one or two had taken a stab at Bruno's lungs and failed before, blotted off the family registers, scratched off the plaques. It gave Mira some comfort to think so—that she was following in the footsteps of another Giovanni woman, passing the point where their tracks suddenly stopped, which meant two things. The first: They all shared a legacy of cells that told the best-children to eat the others. The second: Mira was better than that last Giovanni woman had been.

All of Mira's Aunts were competent. Competent is not the same thing as clever, and it does not necessarily mean you are hungry enough to take risks. Severene was afraid to lose her money; she felt content to sit on huge shares and in fast cars. Ita was stupid. Wonderfully educated, but stupid. Mira preferred the latter, personally, though liking someone never changed the truth about them, and only dumb mice don't use the truth.

Fortunately, she wasn't worried about eliminating either of them. Those two would serve her. They would kiss her rings and fall in line. The Aunts out-of-town—toward the north and the east—wouldn't like it, but they weren't as shrewd as Mira, and they weren't here.

Winning a play in this family wasn't as difficult as the men made it out to be. It just required a little courage—moxie, jewels, guts, whatever. Whatever misogynistic garbage the older cousins were talking about when they'd stand around and watch each other suck cigars, patting backs, wondering who would eviscerate whom. Neutered old fucks and their sycophants. Whatever it was, Mira had more. Mira can make more happen.

_Move, Mira, walk._

She'd quietly assembled Old Money patience into a takeover bid so white-collar cruel it appealed even to a hated Camarilla Prince. A powerful ally—especially a politician—is your ticket sometimes, Mira'd learned. Sebastian LaCroix recognized the budding Giovanni's ambition, appreciated her drive, was flattered she'd approached him with an olive branch—and so he decided to throw-in. They were both usurpers of another don. They didn't bother wasting time with tradition or sentimentality. They were modern people with modern methods and modern minds.

This is how it goes in the West, and with the undead, and in the Family. On one day it is kisses on an old uncle's cheek. One day it is straps on a zebra print thong. On the next day it is valium and silencers and those long, queasy, inescapably Giovanni hugs come with knives.

Mira wasn't a fool. She knows better than to trust a Ventrue. There was ferocity under their neighbor's measured speech and frightening handshakes. He didn't expect a youngling already whetted on the ruthless edge of Jyhad to swear her fealty to him. But the brother-eating Giovanni interested this Prince. LaCroix was a bit notorious for his campaign to seize-and-destroy vampire artifacts—and if the Family is good for one thing, it's digging up what is very, very old.

She'd prepared, as a goodwill gift, what Mira realized would pique LaCroix's interests. She'd attended advantage auctions, listened for secrets, bought information. Buying a Rossellini archeological team further demonstrated her ability to a blue-blooded politician; taking charge of the excavation efforts proved even more exemplary; enlisting the Nagaraja's counsel was disgusting, frankly, but it was all part of the game. Pisha had pointed her right to Turkey, and then, as an act of predictable kismet, pointed Sebastian LaCroix right to her.

They had met face-to-face only through videoconference. But it was obvious Mr. LaCroix approved of her initiative, and also obvious he suspected she'd conspire to dethrone him whenever the opportunity arose. Let him suspect that; seventy percent of the time, he'd be right. But Mira isn't enough of a man or enough of a stronza to let that happen. She knows her limitations. She has a talent for smiling wide and being quiet when it stings.

For now, though, she had the ball in her court, and Prince Los Angeles was all too happy to sponsor her.

One ancient sarcophagus in return for two dead supplanters, a rewritten treaty, and an exclusive position at the local magistrate's side. It seemed too sweet a deal, but the night was here. Any minute now, a Camarilla assassin would infiltrate their estate and wipe two irksome problems from her life. Mira supposed she should feel at least a little guilty, having played house with Chris since kindergarten and attended every one of Adam's graduations from eighth grade through MBA. But the tender sore of their deaths had rinsed right off in the shower. Instead of grieving for what had to happen, she'd stepped out of the tub, wrapped every short brown bristle of hair in a soft blue towel and stood in the steam for a while. She rubbed a random oil into her face. And, smelling of cloves, this once-little-girl-in-daisies-and-white found herself strolling happily down the guest hallway, naked feet leaving damp toe-spots upon impeccable marble. She walked.

 _'It's not as if either one of those boys would pass over a chance to do the same. Lucky for me. My competition is rocks. Too bad, so sad.'_ Mira almost sang it. She had felt, plinking inside of her, a tune.

"Competition" is a truer and easier word than "family." Any minute now, and this bough of the dynasty would be as good as hers.

What would it look like, Mira wondered, winding around potted palms and clean corridors, scent on her neck, mineral stuck on her heels? She guessed Chris was curled up in a twist of quilts, perpetually cold. He'd always been a light sleeper—used to kick the crap out of her when they'd spend November weekends up in Chicago with Great Aunt mother coddled the hell out of him; he'd get homesick. He'd wander around in socks with tiny plastic treads. He'd eat all the chocolate Pop-Tarts from the pantry before his cousin woke up at noon. Chris, _Christopher_ , Mr. Avellone, not-a-Giovanni. The name she chose to stamp on him did not make this any less wrong. Still, he'd never see this coming; he wouldn't guess a fratricide; not from her. It was regrettable, but a not-Giovanni is a waste of bloodline they cannot afford _._ Hopefully LaCroix's agent was fast enough with a sword not to hurt him too badly. The mental image of a cyanotic face strangled in bedclothes, tongue swollen in his mouth, ice-cube toes, was not one she relished. It was not one she wanted to close her eyes in a hot bathroom mirror and see for the rest of her life.

Adam, on the other hand, crashed like brick bags—limbs haphazard, wreck of silk sheets, clogged sinuses. He snorted and puffed like a sow in his sleep. Waltzing in and sticking a knife in him would be child's play. She could probably have done it herself. It was embarrassing to hire company hitmen for such a pathetic task, but prudence was Mira's first bedfellow now; she'd already be marked as a prime suspect; they were all too similar in status and age. Which was sort of a shame, as there might've been some karmatic enjoyment in dipping one finger through that dull stone's brains. He always talked to her like she was a fucking cabbage—a piece of scenery with a vagina. Chauvinist prick. It was cheap dislike, though; it was not worth peeking in on his corpse. Better relax, enjoy this pristine tile beneath her soles, and let another vampire smear red fingerprints across Uncle Bruno's walls.

Uncle Bruno—black Brioni, never pinstripes, feathered kerchief, Cypress cologne. He'd have New York strip steak brought to him alone on a plate at dinners. The juice would pool red in the saucer and his fork would sit upside-down on the rim, unused.

There had been a long braid at her back when Mira was a girl. It was easy to wrap around a fist, not that she'd ever fought back then; Giovanni are bred into patience, to tradition. Afterwards, he'd have her strip off and throw her A-lines away; they'd be replaced by small blouses and Catholic skirts, sheer stockings, polished little-feet shoes. She didn't know what happened to all of those dresses. Someone always came to take the garbage away. Someone would come with new clothes—perhaps that was Aunt Ita, too, because Severene would never take part in _that_ , no way; she'd look the other way; she'd know about it but pretend not to, twist up the volume on her Macy Gray CD and take her earrings out and chill—but they'd forget to bring Mira new underthings. These are the missing pieces Giovanni fathers make sure not to notice, and questions Giovanni mothers do not ask. One long braid for Mira the Girl, frayed at the fishtail, garden daffodils stuck in the loops. Three summers ago, after the diagnosis, Mira the Woman had taken a pair of bush shears, and clipped it all off at her ears.

There's nothing happy in a Giovanni bite. So the Giovanni must be practical people, and own up to their monsterhood. Mira didn't know why he'd wanted her then. She can't imagine what a little girl does to make a man think food. But they'd groomed her, this Uncle and these Aunts. They hadn't meant to at first, but they did—they'd trained this doll of Bruno's a little too well for the possibility—made her take her pleasures a little too pointy and a little too sharp. She was full of virus that couldn't kill her. She knew how to move.

Uncle Bruno pooling red on a white floor would be the sweetest prize Mira Luciana could ever win.

Once the immediate competitors were removed, LaCroix delivered her cushy advisory board seat, and Mira screwed this family's head on straight, old Bruno would be the next silver urn on their fireplace mantle. With that wrinkled badger with his lemonrind race out of the way, nothing would stumble her victory slope to taking this house from the House. The Prince had secured their shared future more than he knew. Things would be very different around here once she was calling the shots and rubbing elbows with Primogen. No more adolescent chess matches for advancement; no more frivolous expenditures on mutiny galas disguised as reunions; no more draining resources chasing pet ghost hobbies. No more being touched. Not by Giovanni teeth, and not by him.

Mira had always been beautiful. Inappropriately beautiful, for her age. She looked eighteen when she was fifteen and twenty-nine when she was twenty. It was a mature beauty, one that made her youngness more apparent in the odd way that beauty sat upon her. So they hadn't realized—what they were doing, who they were making—and they hadn't prepared for her. But what they know or don't know has no bearing upon her. Mira Luciana has been this monster since she was thirteen years old.

There wasn't much farther to walk now. She put one foot after its mate, keeping a leisurely pace, all this energy making her want to sprint. She didn't. Instead, in due time, she rounded the last corner and let herself meander into a snug first-floor antechamber Mira knew would be there. It was a hardwood, icy room with black leather furniture and windows drowning in eggshell curtains; one dusty, neglected fireplace sat beneath an iron cage. There is something tropical about it all, about this house: exotic timber; washed pastels; freshness that seduces you stupid and silent, content to puff away your money and rest. Uncle used this study to smoke or to show off for donnish della Passaglias. Everything smelled like Cuban tobacco—embers, red ink, uncut pineapples in a bowl. She didn't care for that lying medley of scents. But, because it was unlocked, there were sure to be cameras trained every-which-way, and Mira very much cared about that.

A short read—that's her alibi, so easy it felt like a steal. She'd just for a quiet sitting up here in the masculine books and the sugary breeze. She scooted a vase of blue iris off a glass end table and made room for herself. And then it took only a moment, wildly distracted, veins pulsing in her jowl, to thumb through the intimidating bookshelves. Mira blindly pulled Gide and settled down into one vainglorious recliner. There was wax from the wood in every pore. Her elbows sank into plush, shoulders shuffling the upholstery, pride nastily hoping to leave water stains. Her tourniqueted scalp leant back, perfectly at ease. Stray tendrils leaked snakelike down a muscular neck. Bare heels bounced contentedly between ash trays on the coffee table. Silver candlesticks, Venetian chandelier, imported furniture, the perpetual reek of mint to cover embalming. They would all be short-lived. Things would change. Things would never be the same in the California Family.

Mira had just rounded page eighteen when one crisp chirp buzzed in the pocket of her robe.

"Ms. Giovanni," he said—male voice, unmistakable pomp, English the quality of hard crystal.. It was an outrageously simple report. "I have just spoken to my associates. It is done."

"Thank you," she replied. Two words, equally plain—a patter of success that swept through her stagnant heart.

"Yes. We'll speak again very soon."

She listened for the quiet _click_ , flipped her telephone closed, and tucked it dispassionately back into Downy fluff. Mira's body was still. _The Immoralist_ swirled into a meaningless slab. Water trickled droplet-by-droplet down her spine. For six long seconds—before smarter fingers made the pages turn—Mira Giovanni looked at nothing. She sat still.


	38. An Interest

**TO: MAXIMILLIAN STRAUSS**   
**FROM: THE OFFICES OF THE PRINCE**   
**DATE: JULY 6 2010 8:11 PM**   
**SUBJECT: IN RESPONSE TO YOUR INQUIRY**

 

Dear Mr. Strauss,

 

This message is in regards to your pending request to form a joint-council research committee involving the LaCroix Foundation Antiquities Department’s 2010 project agenda.

Prince LaCroix appreciates Chantry interest in city affairs, particularly those pertaining to scholarly fields. Your persistent personal interest is dually noted. Given the specific and mundane nature of the Department’s current activities, however, we feel an outside research partnership would constitute an unnecessary expenditure of Camarilla resources at this time.

The Offices of the Prince graciously declines your request. We simply do not see the need.

Prince LaCroix trusts you will understand this difficult and disappointing decision, and is confident that you and your representatives will abide by it—as you have enjoyed a long history of loyal respect for all Camarilla Court behests.

You are heretofore expected to cease all investigations directed toward Antiquities Department personnel, effective upon receipt of this notice. As an additional note, the Foundation is aware that Chantry agents have been seeking interviews concerning Department activities with certain members of the Los Angeles Primogen. The Prince politely discourages you from this effort.

Consider this an official response.

Prince LaCroix looks forward to continuing his healthy and mutually beneficial relationship with the Los Angeles Chantry. You are invited to submit any future requests to Venture Tower for preliminary review.

Have a very pleasant evening.

Cordially,

 

JOELLE LEFEVRE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES


	39. Shotgun Treason

She said: do what you want.

 _"Do you want permission to breathe, too?"_ Damsel would growl—green eyes, brown eyebrows, red hair like fireants. Lily said no, sorry.

She'd ask, _"Is it OK if I talk to you?"_ Damsel would say whatever, just don't get in my way—flat shoes, smeared eyeliner, coffee cup of lukewarm blood.

Pretty soon, it was: _"Hi, what's going on? Are you busy? Can I do something?"_ Lily would wonder desperately, rolling her hands in the bottom of her t-shirt, turning the colors inside-out. _"Can I help you? Can I give you a hand?"_

Damsel said go ahead, I can't stop you, do whatever the fuck you want.

Right now, Lily was sitting at a far corner of The Last Round bar, four plastic beer cups full of ammunition laid out in a semi-circle on the varnished pine. She was supposed to weigh each piece on a handheld scale and group them. This supposedly improved accuracy. Lily didn't know if that was true or superstition, and she wondered if maybe there just was nothing else around here to keep a fledgling busy right now.

But she did it. Every few minutes, her host would say something interesting—about vampires, politics, American history, who knows what else—and the thin-blood would listen, fishing for bits of knowledge, gently probing, _happy to do it_ , happy to do pretty near anything if Damsel will keep on talking to her.

It was slow in here tonight. Until ten minutes ago, the Den Mother had been sitting across from Lily, grumbling about cunt-polishing Cammies and whimpering Toreador bastards while her tiny, punishing hands lubricated an automatic rifle. She was comfortable with it. The everyday way those fingers worked, with their chipped black nail polish and little thumbs, was impressive. Lily had never touched a real gun in her life. So the kid sat there on a leather stool—the rashes of tender brown dots along her spine stuck to her too colorful, too immature shirt; indexes tucking her too-soft, too-orange red behind both ears—and she'd listen, and she'd learn.

Damsel said: "You need to start thinking, Cammy, or you're going to wind up just like your Sire."

"German?" she cracked.

"Disappeared," the Brujah told her, standing up, and Lily—cupping calibers and touching together her cold, bare knees—felt some of those missing pieces stuck in-between her ribs.

And this is the question Lily never asks, but always waits for answers to—in every single look Ms. Woeburne didn't give her, and in every single thing she didn't say: _Is Rolf dead?_

"Is there something I can do?" the baby wondered. She wanted to help.

Damsel hadn't been pleased with the notion of a Cam-lite stranger pussyfooting their way into her den. Lily wasn't sure if this had to do with the fact she was a thin-blood or that she worked for a Ventrue. It was probably both, but the Den Mother never exactly threw her out. She spat profanities down at the floorboards, toward her small red canvas shoes. She stomped past you, steaming, and told everyone to keep their trap shut around this shit-bird company spy. She certainly didn't want to talk—not that first time, nor the second. But on Lily's third visit, the Brujah had flashed a snarl, twisted her beret around, and barked: "If you're going to be here, don't hide in a fucking corner. Just propped up on your goddamn hands. This is not your happy hour. You're taking up my space, you're lying up in my house, you can haul your weight."

" _I'm just here to talk to Rodriguez,"_ Lily would say—but Rodriguez never seemed to be there, and then he stopped being the reason. She couldn't tell you what the reason was. Only that it was larger than him, or shouting at him, or that he would look at her face and call her _child_. She didn't want him to be disappointed in her. She didn't want him to forget her name.

Last Tuesday, her fourth time at The Last Round, Rodriguez _was_ here—just upstairs, speaking to somebody else. "He's busy," Damsel yawped, popping a bottle top with her teeth and releasing the evil scent. She shoved the drink into the kid's hands without ever asking _do you want dinner_? She'd started speaking to Lily by then, warming up to the idea somewhere between her third and fifth stumbly visits, thumping down a few stools away. "He's got business. Don't bother him. Don't go up there. Maybe later."

Lily looked up the darkness of that flight—its steep, flat-footed wood. She swished blood inside her bottle. If you listened closely, you could hear Rodriguez's voice punctuate the long sentences of whoever he was talking to. She sat down here with Damsel. Lily let an hour pass, and then she chickened out, pulled her jacket off the wall, and ducked through the door. _"I'll just come back,"_ over a shoulder. _"I'll just come back another time."_

This time—the sixth night Lily set foot in The Last Round—Damsel didn't wait to be asked _"Can I...?"_ She delivered the task and then got back to her weapons. And it was reassuring to be here, in a way, plinking bullets into piles, watching the Den Mother clean out nozzles. No other vampires showed up. Intermittently, throughout the evening, an Anarch ghoul or a doll might stumble in, looking bleary, and ask for something to eat. Damsel would slap something out of the fridge and leave them—wilting sandwich, glass of tapwater, jello cup, Miller Lite. They didn't pay anything, but sat perched on their elbows at the darkest booths, red-eyed, subdued, chatting sleepily with each other, spooning peaches out of a can. _"It's not a fucking cafeteria,"_ the Den Mother would bristle, jumbling through drawers for silverware, a handkerchief, a box of butterfly band-aids to stop up a toothmark or cut. _"This is not your neighborhood canteen."_

But she would keep giving them things, and she would keep growling, and she would keep finding Lily work to do.

 _"I'm just, I'll just, I was only, I'm going…"_ There are a hundred ways to end that sentence, and not a one of them was the reason. Or the truth.

Lily told E that Ms. Woeburne needed her to come over and reorganize some case files. It was a lie. Ms. Woeburne wouldn't have let Lily anywhere near her files—not in a million years. But E believed her, because he had no reason not to. She was not a creeper. She didn't cheat. And she wasn't doing anything to hurt him. She just couldn't find the words to explain this thing, the need to go out late and sit with Anarchs, doing mundane little jobs to be useful, and thinking nothing about the future at all.

"Hang on a minute," Damsel gruffed, glanced at her cell phone, and then Den Mother was up.

Lily had rounds in her palms and a bewildered stare. The rifle was in bits on the bar. "What? What happened? Is something…?"

"Nothing. Skelter. Somebody busted their keys in the jeep. Stupid shit. Just keep at it. Just stay here," she'd said, left Lily waiting, and left the screen banging out the back door.

 _"What am I supposed to tell you?"_ Damsel would have asked, but didn't, because she couldn't, because you can't say much about leaders you are sworn to, men you would die for, no-questions at all. " _What do you want me to say?"_

Lily glanced around. Now that she was alone and couldn't offend anyone, the fledgling let her eyes wander. A warm wind blew in through the front door and, for a moment, made the place smell like asphalt, like car mufflers and miles of hungry, natural water. She loosened her jaw to turn that air on her tongue, like you'd see cats do, but got nothing. There was just the temperature and that young city flavor. It didn't taste like much—not like something you could describe and have people understand you. It tasted sort of dark. It was less of a taste or a scent, and more of a color. The absence of light, vast and nomadic, a blackness with no definite edges and no dead end. When it was humid, she would walk in that indefinite black, and feel like she was swimming. She'd feel like a miniscule, short-lived, scattering thing. It was possibility. It was like being an ant, or a molecule, or driftwood, or a minnow, caught out in this massive emptiness, where anything could happen, and your life is too small to be measured. There could be angels out there in that sea. But there were also lions, and there were wolves, and all of the animals out there were also, they said to her, bigger fish than Lily—bigger than she was, or might have been, or could maybe try to be.

She listened. Damsel was outside, barking back and forth with a deep-voiced man. Lily stayed there, sat still. Her eyes dragged back to the photograph wall, counting the long file of soldiers that smiled there, but felt like they'd sear if you stared for too long. There were guns on the tables and dead people pictures on these walls, and here she was. Here she was looking at snapshots of other fish who weren't anymore.

The march of photos always ended at that same face, the portrait of that woman, jabbing in a period point to a list that went on for too long. The paper was old and creased. Someone hadn't taken very good care of it. But Lily thought it was the hardest to look away from. She felt trapped by it—by the white gloves, undone cuffs, sleeves bunched halfway up the arms of what looked like a man's shirt. Her top lip hovered on the edge of expression, but those eyes were utterly unsmiling. They looked like open oil rigs—colorless, bleeding lines. They looked like the outside.

When you looked at that portrait, you could feel fingers move in you in the way they tend to when Brujah are around. It was a grumble, an agitation. It didn't feel nice, but it lulled you, with its temperature and its unkindnesses. It made you feel young and stupid and kind of safe in your youngness and stupidness. It made you feel like you did when you were a teenager. Like nothing was ever going to end.

"It's a disgrace."

A rap on the countertop startled her. Lily jumped out of her uneasiness to find Rodriguez's forearm flattened across the bar beside her, and to find her own eyes there, reflected in the cast of dull steel around his left wrist. They didn't look like eyes. They looked like two sullen leaves of yellowing, about-to-fall-off green.

"What?"

"The picture," he said. "On the dead wall."

"That's what you call it. Dead wall." She felt derailed balancing on this crappy barstool. Nines had noticed her staring. It took too long to snap away from that cuff and see him, remember where she was. "That's, uh. Hopeful."

"That's what it is. You got a recommendation?"

"No, I'm only—" But Lily didn't have the rest of that sentence. She pushed out a weak-ankled attempt at a smile, and looked at the Baron directly, as much as she felt that she could. "Can I start over? Hey. Hi. Sorry. I didn't know you were here."

"Wasn't," the Anarch noted. "But I am now."

She'd been waiting on him, morose curiosity, kind of inexplicable, but now—when Rodriguez finally did materialize—she had a nauseating and undeniable crawl to get away from him. She could see his eye teeth when he talked, and the ringed hand on the counter made Lily squint, like you do when the wind is too strong in your nose. He was too close to her. Damsel kept more distance, and Lily could not help it. She leant the other way.

Lily turned to the door. She'd been thinking about leaving a minute ago, and pictured how it would've been to shrug on her jacket, stand up and walk out of here. She hadn't driven over—she still didn't like to; besides, what if someone saw her car outside?—but it was a nice night. Sixty-eight degrees, freckled moon, the sidewalks drying from a westward rain. She would've been at the corner by now. And if she'd walked quickly, which she usually did, the bus might be squeaking her away down a street toward home. It sent a confusing pang of anger through her; why hadn't she left? Lily didn't know why you'd think something like that if you came here to talk to this man. It didn't make any sense.

Nines Rodriguez looked at her. "What are you doing?" he wanted to know.

"Sorting," Lily said, blankly, because she had a handful of bullets, and didn't really know. It was horrible when Rodriguez looked at you like that, something she'd forgotten until now. It felt like he was waiting for you to do something. Like he was seeing all your shortcomings; like he didn't expect you'd impress him; and if you looked back at the Baron, all those shortcomings would be there, projected back, in aggressive color. Like _what are you going to do about this?_ She wished the Den Mother was here to help her, and looked toward the garage exit, but nobody was there. "Damsel put me to work. I'm not exactly a gun person. I mean, I played paintball once. But this is what she wanted me to do, so…"

"Do it later," he suggested; it was not a suggestion at all.

She dropped the ammunition back into a ziplock bag. Her hands hit her lap because they did not want to go back on that bar.

"The picture," Lily said, needing something, not game for a staring contest, not wanting to look him in the eye again. Yeah, they were blue, but it was an unsettling kind. People sometimes say you can see the life leave someone's eyes at the moment of death. That's how his looked—afterdeath blue, all the time. You're not going to find that one in a Crayola box. "Who is she?"

"Was. Everybody on that wall is a 'was'." He didn't look at the portrait. There was a precipitous lash about to come loose and hit the corner of his eye, and it alarmed the hell out of Lily; she couldn't explain. "Used to be my Sire. Small legend. History now."

"Your Sire." Lily couldn't say if the strangeness came from how different that handsome blonde looked from her descendent, or if it was just difficult to think of Nines Rodriguez as having been human.

"Kid, what the hell did I just say?"

She stomped reverse, scratched her mop for want of something to do with her fingers. The orangeness of Lily always made her feel a little odd. He still had his coat on, and she was jealous; it was a thick, dark leather; hers was cotton, short-sleeved, unfortunately pink.

"We all start off the same way, Slim. I wore those baby shoes a while, too." Rodriguez smirked suddenly, glancing down, away. "Never did a Ventrue's dishes, though. That's all you."

"Lucky me," Lily huffed, feeling the humor at her expense."That's my story! Water the houseplant; stack the plates. Lots of clothespins. Really nice shirts."

"Medal of honor."

"She drinks out of a wine glass."

"You're a hero, kid."

Rolf had been a month of her life, but he made it clear. Things change beneath the large bone of your chest when you die. Your senses and ideas and emotions and wishes are still there, implanted, but perplexed. Your brain is altered, ink spots in a water vase. Lily tried to let the image of Ms. Woeburne, cool and composed with broken nose, sift away. She looked back to the woman on the wall, deciding whether to hate herself or not.

"Damsel tells me you've been in here a bit."

"A couple times," Lily said, trying to brush it off, humbled their Den Mother bothered to mention it. _"We've got bigger things to do than babysit Camarilla rejects,"_ Damsel would bitch, and scowl, and not look at her, and then she'd say, kinder, softer: _"You're not dead next week, come back."_ She hadn't expected to register at all. "I thought about what you said. Thought about thinking about it, anyway."

Nines leaned there, not looking at her, getting bored, impatient with preambles and the tip-toe parts of conversation. He turned the archer cuff. He was starting to look irritated again—vaguely, distantly, annoyed to be doing so little, disliking the non-commitment. "And?"

"Look, to be honest, I'm having a hard time getting it straight," Lily told him, glad not to be watched. "I was hoping it would be cool if I came back in and talked to you some more. Sorry if that's presumptuous. I don't want to get in the way around here, and, well, obviously we're pretty much strangers. But I don't know who else to go to. And you seem to have done this Camarilla thing before."

"Does it seem like that?" Rodriguez asked, not really invested, mild amusement at her expense.

"What did I just say?"

The remark caught him off guard. Nines chuffed.

"Smartass," he observed. "OK. That's fine."

"I'm not." Lily wasn't sure if she should go ahead and laugh. She wanted to touch her face and shook the defense mechanism off. "Really, I'm not. I'm just nervous. I'm stressed out."

"I bet, kid."

She doubted Rodriguez was as unaware of himself as the Brujah put on. But the pretense of a vampire who could be talked to meant a great deal—more than made sense, more than one unlucky introduction and a fifteen-minute conversation in a truck that smelled like diesel, then a bar that reeked of smoke. Chances like these are fragile; blink and you'd loose the thread, drop the needle, lose it forever. Lily wouldn't be able to forget about it without at least following that thread a little longer. She owed it to herself to find out why.

"Yeah. By the way—sorry for before. Blowing you off. I didn't mean to leave like that," Lily apologized. Her host didn't look like he was listening too closely. The Anarch reached into his jacket pocket, looked at his phone, considered shutting it off. "I just didn't know what the hell I was doing here."

"Do you know what the hell you're doing here tonight?"

"Not really," she confessed, a flimsy and short-lived smile.

"I got reasons if you need them." Rodriguez put the phone away. "Otherwise, there are things I could be doing, and the door's over there."

Was it such a bad thing? Lily stepped out into the city with the careful hope that maybe she'd find Nines Rodriguez in it, and maybe he could teach her something. She didn't know what. Anything would do. Anything had to be better than being this.

"No, I'll stick around. I do have a reason." She said so with conviction. He did not ask what it was. "I'm not sure it's a good reason, though."

"Long as you're not wasting my time, Slim, I can spare some for you. Let's go upstairs so I don't have to shout over this," Rodriguez ordered, indicating with some impatience the pair that just walked in, bickering. Damsel and Skelter let the backdoor slam. They were a funny, offbeat contrast: size difference, voice changes, hawing at each other. She lunged ahead of him and hollered back while he tried to speak over her. Neither one of them paid any attention to the mess of bullets or to Lily. Neither one of them said hello to Nines.

She didn't want to go upstairs. Lily didn't want to go—she really didn't want to. But there was nowhere else to be, and he was already leaving, so she did, too.

She followed Nines up, listening to the argument below and behind them, now muted through old floorboards. It was cooler up here. The air away from that bar seemed stiller, the ventilation fresher, the dark corners welcomingly empty. And then she wasn't sure why Upstairs had been such a scary prospect. There wasn't much to see: dusty shelves; a couple of framed, push-pinned maps; some papers tacked on some blank walls; several barren tables beneath blurry, rattling windows that frowned over the front door. You could see down the street—could see into the boarded tenements and double-parked cars, over the right-angle allies and viaducts—but she didn't try to. Rodriguez scraped out a chair for her and let it sit there in the dim light. He didn't wait on Lily. There were street lamps glaring through the foggy glass behind him.

"Let me be clear," the Baron said. "You're welcome to walk in this place whenever you please. But I didn't invite you, ask you, or expect you. _You_ came in here. Why."

"You said," she said. She sat across from him, but did not scoot in. "You said if needed help, I could. I think I need some. So if you have any advice. If you can let me in on something. What do I need to know?"

"I hate that fucking question," Rodriguez told her. But he seemed to settle a bit; he hooked one arm over the chair, the other in his lap. She put both of hers on the table, awkwardly far away.

"Uh. Sorry?"

"Why don't you tell me something. What did you want to hear me say?"

"Hah! Shit, I didn't… I don't know," she laughed, exhausted at being put on the spot again. Head-on questions are the only kind Rodriguez asked, though, so it's not like you could be mad about it. But what can you say to that? One minute, fast: what do you want?

"Anything," she blurted. "Everything."

"Everything," he echoed, like she'd said something cute.

"Now you're just giving me a hard time."

"You enjoy it. And kid, you better take it when it comes, and when I'm here. I got other things on my agenda than giving out advice."

Lily was about to take a crack at that unfortunate, machismatic phrasing, but her mood floundered partway at the realistic likelihood she would not see Nines Rodriguez again a long time, or maybe never. It'd be dumb to waste the chance. "I just want to know more than I do," she said, hoping that would convince a dissident she deserved an hour of his time, or forty minutes, or only two.

She figured the first second starts here:

"You got to understand I don't have all the answers, child. I can't explain everything for you. This game has been played since the dawn of time, kid; every century is a hundred new rules."

You could believe that in the way Ms. Woeburne lived and spoke. You could believe it in the decorum of meeting a Prince and in the polish on ninety floors of imported marble, white-or-black. "How do you keep track of them all?"

"You don't. You can't. You weren't meant to. Only ones who can are the devils who wrote them, and that's by design. They don't want their laws used against them. You think devils want to let regular people, everyday people, get some kind of oversight over the shit that they do?"

"Ms. Woeburne said—"

"I have nothing bad to say about Ms. Woeburne except that she chose her side. And I know mine."

Lily's smile didn't have any happiness to it. It's the discomfited smile of having walked into a lie. "The side with no law against kicking the shit out of women on the other side?"

He stared hard at her. His face was unfriendly. "The side that does whatever needs doing to whoever is going to try to shut us down."

He let her sit on it. He rested one hand on the armor of his wrist.

"And that's not a woman," Nines said. Lily didn't ask what he thought Ms. Woeburne was.

After a while, when the silence grew sore, and it became clear Lily had nothing safe she was willing to say, they fell away from the laws. She looked elsewhere and tried not to feel the light rain of anger—the pop in the hose, where the water, cooking in a summer sun, leaks out hot and makes an evil color of mud. They were thankfully too far apart, separated by this table, for her to see if that eyelash was still threatening him—softly, in some insubstantial, lie-in-the-grass way.

Nines, narrow, said: "You asked me where I came from. I came from 1940. Forty-two. Bad year to die. Bad year to start playing Jyhad. But it'd been a pretty bad time to be alive."

The thin-blood was pokerfaced. Right brain and left brain don't always catch up to one another, and Lily's hadn't realigned themselves to this part of her new world yet. Who knew how old Rolf was—definitely not her—but you know what? Ms. Woeburne mentioned the other day, briskly, that Prince LaCroix served Napoleon. Just like that; like it shouldn't have meant anything to Lily; like he didn't look maybe about twenty-five. She'd backpedaled off it and didn't ask anything else. She didn't want to open that mental can of worms. She let Nines Rodriguez talk at her for as long as he didn't think Lily was a waste of time.

"My story isn't special. That's the only reason why it's important, and why I'm sitting here saying what I'm saying to you. That's what snakes do, child. They put rot in the system. This was Depression. I was just a kid then. Real kid—not a dead kid—but I'm not going to say I couldn't have been a better kid than I was."

Lily muttered more than she ought to. The premonition of _something to do_ troubled her. She kind of wished she had a mug to slam. "Yeah, well. I'm not the same kind of person you are, probably. But if this taught me one thing: people without laws are shit. Has that really changed, because I don't think so. They want to kill me for something I can't help. That I really, obviously can't help and cannot change. The Sabbat, I mean—not you guys. It's just… I'm sitting here, and I'm like: does genocide mean anything to you people?"

"Your Camarilla law's not doing much to curb that, child. You got to know that more than I do. People are going to do whatever they want, whether or not there's a law against it. And they don't want you."

"No, they don't. They don't care. Fine. The Sabbat—they want me _dead_ ," she swore, and with sudden aggression, squeaked her chair. Lily really had meant the Sabbat, but _They_ is more than that. _They_ is a roiling, vitriolic mass of creatures that are dangerous to her.

He glared back at her in a way that had nothing to do with his expression, but something underneath, the same way you know a blade is inside a sheath without seeing it. This is the feeling Lily hates about talking to Nines Rodriguez; everything asks, crossly, _and so?_ "They'd do it to us if we let them."

She could not say which They he meant. When you are living under siege, everyone who is not Us becomes They.

"But I can't do what you do because I am not a Brujah. I don't have an army, or a den. Or a Damsel. Jesus, I'd do something else if I could. I would. Really. I would," she promised him, sincerely, enough that it might've frightened her were it not for the distraction of being somewhere unfamiliar. There was a pressure building up behind her eyeballs. Or maybe it was a small kernel, deep in the middle, that had come loose—one she was just starting to feel. It had been there a long time, a hard knot, a stone. A torch to a stone warms it up fast. Sometimes all you need for a forest fire is a match and one solid gust of wind. "And I'm not sorry. I'm glad you shot those guys. Some people deserve to be shot."

"Some do. But we think you better have a reason if you're going to kill somebody, and once you've got that, you better do whatever you need to, no matter what some devil's law says you can. You need to have the conviction," he said, and she opened her mouth to say something—who knows what—but the Brujah's hard look cut it off. She could remember how he looked standing over the body of that screaming Sabbat, the two shots. It had scared her then. But there was a part of Lily that wanted the strength of his arm and the nothingness in his face for herself. It was a kind of justice.

"If they could do to you what they do to me—"

"If that victim card's the only one you got to play, child, you're not going to last. I understand you got it rough. But you need to square with that, and you need to accept what you are, what to do about it." The Anarch, mildly apologetic, placed heavy hands on the table across from hers. "You asked for advice. That's the best I have," he told her, plainly. "I'm sorry if you don't like it. But if what you wanted was somebody to pet your head and tell you everything's going to be fine, you got the wrong movement. You go to your grandpa for that shit. When you're ready to do something about it, you come talk to me."

He hadn't meant it to be funny, and it wasn't—not really, not in that way—but Lily in that interim, some inside yoke yanked her back. It pulled her out of the conversation, out of the bar, until she felt like she was watching everything on playback through a faraway screen. Freckles, and short hair, and an eyelash, and bloodstain pimpled on a shirtsleeve that washed out. In 2009 she got a C in Soviet History and was depressed for the whole week. There was a piece of vanilla cake in the refrigerator when Rolf came over that night; she never got to eat it. There were so many bullets in Lily's two cupped hands they were spilling on the floor. She hadn't been able to contain them all. Her nerves erupted into static and she could see all ten of her fingers on the knotted pine, the black clouds outside, the way Nines Rodriguez was sitting there in fucking vambraces and telling her in low-tone indignation _do something_ , and suddenly it was all hilarious. She started shaking. It wasn't even that funny, she thought, feeling the rise of air in her stomach, the question: _what am I doing?_ , trying to understand it, _why this?_ , to wrap her hands around something unfathomable, to start to grieve it, to comprehend the loss. It wasn't funny at all. Lily burst out laughing.

"Has anybody ever said you are too much?" she blurted.

Rodriguez didn't know how to handle it. He stiffened in the chair and glanced both ways, unable to get the joke. He looked a little offended, but Lily couldn't help it; it was something external, a feeling that punched holes in her suddenly, like a gunshot wound. It was not joyous laughter. It made her belly snap and sting.

"Of what?" he demanded, unhappily. She grabbed her mouth, trying to hold it down. The Brujah wasn't used to being laughed and he didn't like it too much. "You just lost your mind."

"Nervous, I'm nervous," she managed. Lily felt like a soda bottle tossed around to pandemonium. It was a kind of sick feeling—the kind of sickness that comes enjambed with the freedom of being reckless, and knowing you are small. She had to let it happen until the laughter ran dry, and then it was convulsions, half-second gasps like kicks in the ribs. There were fat tears rolling down her nose and she messily scrubbed them away. "I'm not laughing at you. It's nerves. That's why this is happening."

There's one origin story behind all rebellions. The usual one is so primary you'll rarely hear it articulated: a people split because they were faced with a problem their structure could not fit around. Some states erupt ipso facto, the reaction to an intentional action. A civilian is bludgeoned to death and a royal guard is macheted in the back of the head. This is a breakage and an equal exchange. But other rebellions happen not action-reaction, but because of a critical failure to act. A disease goes untreated; a decay is unanswered; a population is ignored. These things happen because no one steps in to untwist the chain and it strangles the dog. These things happen because the can of mace sat in your closet too long and it popped. This thing happened because, last Wednesday, Lily was standing alone in a fresh Ventrue kitchen, cutting the dead stalks of callas, and caught herself holding the knife like a live snake—muscling it tightly, arm shaking, like it was going to twist around and bite her. Or take out her teeth.

" _What are you doing? What am I doing?"_ she'd cried at herself. And she'd shaken to laughter then, too.

"I don't know if I can do this," Lily told him.

He said: try.

"The picture," she remembered. For some reason it felt like it mattered—like it would tell her if they were really ever the same. "Did you love her?"

"I didn't volunteer," he said, ambivalently, the real question she meant to ask. Lily felt kind of put-off.

"Yeah. I'm sorry."

"You can call what my Sire did opportunism—what she did to me ruined a lot of kids like me to get what she had. It is what it is, Slim. She did business to keep the devils off her, and anybody with the sense and the muscle does the same. But you did what you said you would, you followed through on your promises, and you could count on her word. That's what being an Anarch is about, child. Only the weak let the letter-of-the-law dictate what's right and only the stupid don't acknowledge that situations, and laws, change. You got to think for yourself, and you got to figure out what people tell you doesn't make things what they are. Not even me," he said; he blinked; he rocked a little, imperceptibly impatient, side-to-side in place across this empty space. Rodriguez's hands were folded beneath the old cut on his chin, elbows on the table. Lily thought he looked like a dream sequence.

"And you're still here. So what happened to her?"

"A bomb happened to her." And she knew that it would've been polite to look shocked, to mouth _no_ , but abstract violence couldn't her upset anymore. At some point, say, during a revolution, there is simply so much reality peeling around you that the _idea_ of violence doesn't exist—not unless it's in the form of a bullet aimed at you. "Blew down a whole goddamn street. New York City. And, of course, the Camarilla didn't do shit." It was a deep hatred, something that came naturally to him, that made cloudcells out of deadness in his stare. "Did they send a Sheriff? No. Call court? Not a chance. Inquest? Please. I was in Chicago at the time, but I knew what happened. Everybody did."

All things considered, Camarilla was a pretty word. It sounded slightly foreign and delicately sweet. It was like a woman's name, a shore town, forgotten Latin—the kind that you read on an epitaph or something leather-bound.

Lily jumped. Nines had booted her chair leg with the tip of his shoe. It had the desired effect as she came skittering awake.

"Left you behind," the Brujah saw.

"Maybe. Yeah." She reached back and found something smaller to wonder about. "What's a Sheriff?"

Now the Anarch was laughing. He made a half-hearted attempt to turn his face away from her, but the crumpling side of his mouth gave him away. Lily sulked.

"Don't be a dick. You asked what I wanted to know."

"I'm not laughing. I'm wondering how you made it as far as you did," was all he said, a cruel observation, not without pity as the bemusement faded. "Only explanation I got for that is 'providence.' What's a Sheriff. Do the Ventrue teach you anything? Miracle you don't have the Scourge on your back." He paused. Another frank, should've-been-dead snort. "Don't tell me. 'What's the Scourge'."

Lily sank into her seat. "Yeah, Nines. What's the Scourge."

Rodriguez shook his head in a bleary sort of disbelief. "You poor baby. Seems like an unkindness to let you go back there."

"That's not fair. I don't know the lingo. Big deal. I've been getting along. Better than most of us, better than usual," the thin-blood swore, though the ease of that suggestion worried her. She unstuck her thighs from the uncomfy chair. She shifted painfully and pictured E's sunny smile. "I've got a job, I've got a sponsor. You can't seriously think I'd stay in LA if I didn't. And for the most part—" she promised, "—for the most part, nothing bad has happened to me. Not besides that one time. I'm thankful you were there, don't get me wrong. But the Sabbat thing—that's not really my life. Not like you think. That was a freak accident."

"Child, you don't know a damn thing. Don't get offended," he chided her when Lily wrinkled into a frown. The Baron's fingers glinted beneath the overhead with his elbows on the table, and he didn't remove them, not just to talk. "You don't have the luxury, and I'm making a point. There are no freak accidents. There are superstitious shovelheads who'd kill you, and there are bureaucrats who don't give a shit if they do. And it's happened to better than you. You want to subsist, you need people. And that's different from what you have."

"Ms. Woeburne—"

"I'm not talking about Ms. Woeburne. I'm talking about you. Nobody from that tower needs your vote, kid. Just a hard truth. You're being offered half-rate protection from people you clearly—" He gestured around. "—don't need it from, and when you were in trouble, they had other things to do."

"OK. What were they supposed to do? There are regulations about us. About people like me. There are codes, or something. And she's tried to protect me, but sometimes they make it harder than—"

"Kid, why are you saying this to me? Let me tell you something," he said, and looked exasperated—fed-up on her behalf—enough so that she shut up, feeling wrong. "When the law stops protecting you, you don't protect the law. Let's say the Ventrue honor their arrangements with you. I doubt it, but for the sake of your argument, let's pretend. It's still people _like_ you—people who are one piece of paper, or one telephone call, or one Ms. Woeburne away from where you're standing now –who are going to suffer when the Free-State is no longer around to stand between Sebastian LaCroix's Camarilla and everyone else. Do you want to take that risk on a piece of paper? A piece of paper and a junior bureaucrat, who does not live here, and could hop on a plane anytime, leave you hanging? Los Angeles is your home. You love it, you hate it, it is where you got to be. So you might not like what I'm telling you, and you might not like how I do what I do—in fact, I know you don't. But you don't need to like me. You need to get your head in this game. And you need to listen when I tell you that, no matter how much you like it."

Rolf did not like it. Sebastian LaCroix did not like it. Ms. Woeburne seemed to like her, but she, too, did not like it—did not like it one precious, patient, peacekeeper bit.

Lily writhed because she didn't know how else to listen. There was a dull pulse thwacking the underside of her sternum. "Look. I don't have anything. I don't do anything. I don't know anything. If I did, then I wouldn't be in this situation. So I don't know what I can offer. I can't offer you people anything. I don't have anything to give you you'll want."

"You're about to piss me off," he snapped at her. She winced and held onto the sides of her chair.

"I'm listening to you," Lily said. It seemed like a compromise.

"Are you? Then don't bargain with me. And don't you dare sit across from me in my den and tell me what I want. I didn't ask you for something. This is not a trade floor; I am not a Prince profiteering off dead children. When I want something from you," the Baron scolded, "you'll know it."

"I didn't mean that like it sounded. I'm just not sure. I'm not sure what's happening. I asked you questions. I don't know how I got here." The thin-blood didn't know what she was saying. You could tell when you'd let him down. Lily still didn't know why she'd come here, but she didn't want to do that. She didn't want Nines Rodriguez to be disappointed in her. As uneasy as this place made her feel, there was always a compulsion to stay. There was always possibility behind the paranoia of it: there was a chance, however slim, that you might dodge the bad ending allotted to you, if only you'd take the right steps. There was a hope that Nines Rodriguez could help you become something.

"But I don't even know where to start. I'm not sure how. How to change enough to make a difference. It just seems like—"

"That's a stupid excuse. Freedom ain't cheap."

"Neither is being alive. Right now, I'm trying to stay alive. That's it. That's all. And it seems like—"

"Slim, if you're going to lick somebody's boots—if you're going to lie down under a goddamn steamroller and hope a snake condescends to let you live—then I got no way to help you."

"Are you going to let me talk?" she asked him.

The Baron closed his mouth and sat back in the squeaking wood chair.

Lily, tired of being talked over, got it out: "The longer I do this—Anarchs, Camarilla, whatever—the more I'm out here, the more I see what's going on around me. And it sucks. It's fucked up, I get that, and it's wrong. It's so wrong. I'm not happy about the way I live. But the longer I do, the more it seems like there's no point in this for me. I mean, Nines. _You_ or _Them_ is a lot harder to wrap my mind around when I'm wondering if I can make it home tonight without getting a baseball bat in the back of my head. Do you understand that? Can you please just try to get what I'm saying to you?"

"I don't tolerate Sabbat in my neighborhood. There's a reason why."

"This is way beyond the Sabbat. And you know that." The Brujah withdrew whatever criticism he'd been about to serve. Lily knew she was not very tough. She did not impress anybody. Maybe she was not audacious enough to subsist. But she would not tolerate him being wrong about her on this.

"Look. You people have been nice to me. You didn't have to do that, and I _do_ like it, OK? I like being here. I like Damsel. I like walking into a place where I don't have to think someone's going to kick in the door and start shooting any minute. I like it a lot. But what difference does it make what I think?" It was something Lily internalized a long time ago; it was still hard to say. The admission tasted horrible and swallowed down painfully, like boiling water, or like bitterness, or like vomit when it wants to come out. "What does it matter if I can't stop thinking that tomorrow, next week, in a month, I'm not going to be here anymore. I'm probably going to be dead. No," she insisted, sharply, when the Brujah looked as though he might say something, and he did not. "I am."

For a second or two—not much more than that, but for a measurable moment, a real spot of time—Nines looked like he didn't know what to say.

"You're not dead yet," he noticed. She breathed out dismally, leant forward like someone who wanted to sleep, and pushed the slender angles of her face into both hands.

"You know, I didn't… I didn't ask for this." Wretched honesty is the only kind you've got if you're like her. Lily had squared with honesty since she'd been caught drinking tap water one night, over her teeth and into her belly, and saw horror register on Rolf's face. Her knees hurt where they touched beneath the weathered tabletop. He throat hurt worse. "I didn't volunteer, either. I didn't love my Sire. I wasn't looking for money, or business, or forever, or anything like that. I am twenty-two. I was twenty-two," and the past-tense fell on her lap like something broken, tuneless, like dead weight. "I just wanted to have somebody for awhile. I just wanted to get laid. It sounds so fucking stupid now. I was so stupid; oh my god, I know that; but I didn't know this. I didn't know it would go wrong, or that I'm wrong, or whatever. I did not ask for this to happen to me."

"Course not. It's a terrible thing. But terrible things happen. You can cry about it. Or you can—"

"I am not crying," Lily shouted.

She wasn't. They looked at each other. She dropped her eye sockets back in her hand heels and pushed.

Nines didn't meet her gaze this time—she wouldn't have let him—but his voice was softer. "It's not your fault, kid. Frankly, we don't know why this happens."

Lily reached back for it, siphoning the colors that rose against her eyelids, and found images-a handful of days that circled through her again and again and again. Black leather, shoe polish, a pistol in a jacket; a new white car she let her ride in once, and an envelope of cash, one or two every week; stockings before they ran; a comb with one grim brown hair, proof of an engineering flaw, gnarled in its teeth. She was sick of wishing Rolf hadn't found her, or that someone else had. She was sick of wishing she was Ms. Woeburne. The baby breathed in; she felt the compression of her tissues, layers of health, the squishiness of her palms, and the dryness of her tongue.

"I'm doing the best I can," she swore through her fingers. Her throat was like hard sand. Her hands buzzed with the weight of feeling doomed."The very best I can. This—me being here? This is me facing up to the music. But sometimes. Sometimes I just want to stop, you know?"

"Can't. Sorry I don't have a better tune for you, kid."

Lily unscrewed the least tragic laugh that she could. "You know, the first time I came in here—when I told you about Ms. Woeburne. You said I wasn't making it," she echoed, a cringing, rueful grin—or something like a grin—an unsure display of the teeth. The Childe picked up her finger and pointed it at him, accusatory, mimicking the same way he'd talked to her that night. " _'You are not making it, child.'_ I couldn't believe you said that to me. But I kept thinking it. I thought about it all the time."

He wasn't apologetic. Rodriguez didn't say a word, and she hated feeling waited-for like this—that he was going to make her say it—that there are some kinds of people who won't accept anything vague, or gray, or implied.

"I want to make it," Lily told him.

"Then I need you to listen to me," the Baron said, somber, low enough so that she had to scoot forward, like there was a secret to bottle up and wear on a chain. "Play it safe, child. Do not tell anyone out there what you told me. I know what that sounds like, and what you got to be thinking. But I'm not worried about that right now. You've got to look long. You got to be smarter than most."

Candlewax promises. They would melt in a few hours and leave cold, functionless spots sticking to the back of her brain. She couldn't get those stains out. She couldn't unlight the wick of that anger; there was too much oil left sitting, sloshing, in the lamp.

"I hear you. And anyway," the kid joshed then, wanting to scatter the bleakness, swat the negative tension away. "How would I bring it up, huh? _'Hey! Can't come by Fridays, sorry. Friday's when I go yell at Rodriguez'._ "

"I'm not joking. You'd get run up for treason."

Her expression thinned, but his face didn't change. She shot a frank, incredulous look. "Nobody up there knows my name. Besides, I'm not technically registered, and I doubt that's going to change any time soon." _Registered_ ; a reassurance—or a warning—from Ms. Woeburne. The thin-blood wasn't precisely sure what that implied, but after seeing the building and the methodical way her heritage ran, could dream a few possibilities up. "You have to exist to offend somebody."

"Slim, I do not hold bets on what the Ventrue will find offensive, and kids who wash cabinets shouldn't, either." He looked at her in a way that dared. "But I won't tell on you."

"Hah. Yeah. I guess you won't. I'm not joking, either—not really. I don't tell anybody anything. I learned that lesson. You can't tell them anything. I'm not that dumb."

"I didn't say you were dumb, honey. I said you have got to be smarter than—"

But can I tell you something?" Lily felt like lying down for a minute. She didn't think she could carry it around anymore. Her throat hurt, desperately; her forearms were flat on the table, hands far from the body, like they wanted to stretch; and she felt like she was begging; and like she was tired; and yes, like something had made her a little bit dumb.

The Baron didn't say yes but he didn't say no.

Lily told him: "When this happened to me, I had no idea what I was. None. None," she tried it again, but couldn't say _none_ in a way that was strong enough, that gave full truth to that ineffable word. "My Sire—I don't know what he wanted. I don't know why he wanted it from me. He took off, and that's what I knew. I didn't know how to hunt. I didn't even know I was a vampire. And what gets me is that I did make it. I'm here." Another ineffable word, _here_ —one that can't make the feelings entrenched there come alive. "I'm here, somehow. So far. I made it without him, and I'm angry. I'm angry that it was me, that he did this to me, that it wasn't somebody else. Thing is, I should be angry at him. But I'm not. He was an asshole," she figured, because she didn't really know anything about Rolf, except for the way he had done her a wrong. "Or maybe he was just scared, I don't know. I don't miss him. But I miss that I didn't have him. That's what gets me. I could've had a Sire. I could've had pretty close to a fighting chance. That's what I miss."

"Do you know for a fact that's the story? Kid, anything could have happened. I told you what this city is. Any thing can happen out here. It's useless to guess."

"I don't really care what happened to him. But I wish that I did."

Lily didn't want Nines Rodriguez to say anything else. She was tired out by it, tired of it. She took the one breath she needed—for no other purpose now than to not lose her momentum, to take one more step.

"His name is E." The letter slid over the gums and canines and tongue like professing. It alarmed her to materialize it. It alarmed her like that eyelash had—for a reason she couldn't quite explain, but one that felt almost just like fear, and made her guts tangle, as though they'd all made an irrevocable mistake, something she couldn't take back. Letting that letter through her teeth was like bringing out the most kept thing she probably had. She could hear herself say it and the unremarkableness of her voice startled Lily. "He's not my roommate. He's my Childe."

"Who else did you tell this," he wanted to know.

"Nobody. It was an accident. I don't know how we turned out OK." It was nice to tell somebody this. She felt a little better, instantly. Or, at least, it didn't make her feel worse. Lily didn't bother looking for the Baron's expression or asking his opinion; about this, she didn't honestly care what Nines Rodriguez had to say.

"I don't care if he's your doorstop. You better tell me you declared him."

The urgency—that's what spooked her. Lily didn't look at him, but stood, automatically; Nines caught her down with an authoritarian flick of eyes to the open chair. She sat. The alarm came back, and it was almost just like fear again. She didn't know how to act.

"Back like you were. Here's how it is: Who you want to bring into this is your business. That is how it stands here. The Camarilla does not agree. When I say the Ventrue 'don't agree,' what I mean is that they have chopped a baby's head off for less."

Lily went waxy; bumps lit down her neckbones. Ms. Woeburne failed to mention that detail. "Ms. Woeburne," Lily parroted, blankly. "She did. She said it was OK. She said she dealt with everything. It was never that big of a deal, honestly; it's just my personal… my life. I didn't plan on bringing it up."

"If you're telling me the truth, bring him around."

"I'm telling you the truth. But I don't think he'd want to." She regarded her sneakers. They looked a dozen miles older and poorer every time. It was the truth; E would want nothing to do with any of this, but a nagging sore in the fledgling's gut forbade her from accepting it as completely sincere. She lifted both shoulders up, let them fall down. "He's not really himself around you guys. Vampires, I mean."

"Smarter than most," the Brujah remarked. Lily was inanely distracted by everything and nothing. She crossed her arms and held the elbows, wanting to be somewhere else, but not sure she ought to. There was a lighter in his hand now, and the rawness of the knuckles had healed up. They looked like anybody's might. "You smoke, Slim?"

She shook her head. Hanging around here was beginning to get perilous in too many ways. "No thanks. I'm going home."

The fledgling didn't wait. She rose, groped thrice for her jacket, and finally remembered it was hanging downstairs. "I've got to go," Lily said again, absently. She expected him to stand up. When he didn't, it struck her weirdly. The contrast of being looked at worried Lily. She felt like a creature with all the hair poking up on its dorsal. She wanted to take a step back, to cede territory, but she didn't. "Thanks. Thanks for talking to me. It helped. I don't know what to do with it, but I think it helped me. Just it's getting to be that hour. And, uh, shocker: I don't want to get my teeth kicked in again."

"Hm." The fire caught the cigarette. "I wasn't going to say anything. But maybe you should take some of that money you got." When it burned, it started in a contained point, a negative color you could not put down. "That Camarilla money you got doing Camarilla penance scrubbing Camarilla floors, and maybe you should buy yourself a gun, child."

"Maybe," Lily said, like she couldn't not-say, a tic of despair.

Willpower game—shotgun or tobacco. Smoke from the barrel is the pinnacle dare. You don't do it because you like it. You do it because it's dangerous and because you can't get the taste in your mouth any other way. You don't have to be a smoker to understand it, to want a part of something that might be bad for you but promised so much. The Baron did not try to stop her. He sat under the clock on the wall and the black of the outside and the ruckus downstairs and it was a challenge to know he existed at all.

"Nines."

He took the cigarette out of his mouth.

"What do they say about lies?"

"Can't tell a good lie without knowing the truth," Nines said.


	40. Keeping Time

It was July—the sixth, and a Thursday, to be exact—when Ms. Woeburne entered Venture Tower with another classified envelope under her arm.

Their building was in disarray as much as it ever was (which wasn't much). There were janitors sloshing the scuff marks from Mr. LaCroix's black marble foyer; there were wrinkles in the curtains; there were people who insisted on trying to force open the conference room windows, and they got stuck. The midweek muffins were stale and the security presentations bored everyone. You might suppose a place as scowling as this is not in the lavish party business, but this just goes to show you how stupid it is to let your suppositions guide you, Ms. Woeburne notes.

Plans for the party: there was a paper storm of signings, phone calls and catering orders to the local blood bank. There were guests lists drafted in think-tank lounges nobody used. There were servants scuttling at all hours; there were financiers shuffling for Prince LA's signature; there were guard captains normally more concerned with mapping Anarch activities taking their pick of bullet-proof gazebos. None of this should surprise a Foundation officer. If you were a little more seasoned in this game, it wouldn't surprise you, either.

Ms. Woeburne had always known the Prince to be a perfectionist—always, since the days when he was only her employer, and she was not her current self. LaCroix Foundation does all of its business The Right Way. Up to the masthead, down to the small-stuffs. Big things like toppling markets and cutting off heads. Tiny things like mood light, tablecloths, calculating the exact moment a Camarilla cat will burst out of a Giovanni bag.

The organization and the famiglia had not engaged one another on the West Coast for many decades—not in any official, formal capacity, at least. Mr. LaCoix hoped this arrangement proved his modern mindset; and, as a spearhead for modernity, he could not afford to fall short of audience expectations. The Giovanni agreed. They agreed eagerly enough to throw themselves a unity celebration in their lurid hills estate, at least, and that was quite a lot to consider for a murder of Ventrue delegates dressed, always, in black. A suburban mansion, financed by Venetians, designed by antiquated architects, commissioned by roly-poly dons with a love affair for the classical brow of the Vatican. It was a grandiose palace, an ostentatious display, and a perfect venue for Los Angeles's newest Prince to shake the hand of his newest cabinet member.

Bruno Giovanni no doubt assumed this membership was directed at him—and, perhaps, rightfully so. He was in for a rather nasty surprise when Mira scaled the stage.

Ms. Woeburne found the idea of Jyhad cocktail parties excessive. Actually, "damned fruity" was the phrase she'd used on the telephone with Roderick last night. It was no secret to the Hendon posse that always-exigent, too-particular Mr. LaCroix could be a bit of a dandy about making impressions at social events. He wasn't very good at it, to be honest, and the Prince knew that. It made him unnecessarily fussy. But if you are going to be disliked—to be snubbed, scoffed upon, and looked-at down somebody else's nose—you had better know so going in.

Sebastian LaCroix can't be faulted for understanding the importance of showmanship. And, as his representative, S.W. would attend the show, certainly. She'd probably end up ferrying iced AB- around. But if you'll allow her a little selfishness, then let her be irritated, too. She had graver worries than rococo, champagne glasses and what to wear to some flamboyant postmortem promenade. Let her think that. Let Ms. Woeburne have that, at least. It's what she wanted to believe— _I'm too important for this_ —and that's what she said on the telephone in her uncompromising, spiny-fish voice that made Roderick secretly titter into his palm, since horridness is funny when it's miles of ocean away.

No one would have tittered at Ms. Woeburne tonight, though. She darkened Venture's lobby doors with a scowl and a push, both more aggressive than necessary. The man at the front desk looked up when she came in and immediately recognized that right-angles, avian look. Her long sleeves were pressed flat and there were five minuteman buttons on her unfriendly black vest.

"Ms. Woeburne," he greeted her. The neonate pushed aside a stack of incoming mail and lifted his fingers from the computer keys. "How are you."

"Tom," she noticed. And she ought to—Tom Genovese was one of the younglings, ascetic and competent, eager-to-please, Mr. LaCroix designated as one of S.W.'s on-call aides. He was comically large in body to sit, clean-faced and fresh, at reception. Too many teeth in his mouth and a slicked-back dome of perfect, bluebird black. Huge hands stomped staples into print-outs and coolly doled out evening packets. Tom had spent these first five years of afterlife as a bodyguard, and—Sireless, shaven-faced, wearing four-pocket slacks—was desperately trying to spit-shine-smile his way into an office. His tie was checkered. His was the placid, empty, agreeable expression, and the mildly pleasant smells of a lowborn Ventrue wanting to move up in the world. "I didn't expect to see you here. What happened to Ms. Lefevre?"

They didn't speak much, Woeburne and Genovese, since she hadn't much need of him. It was not mistrust; not precisely; and it was not doubt in his abilities, which were just the appropriate size, even if he was not. It was clearly not a lack of work to do on the Foreman's behalf. And, whether you believe this or not, it wasn't because a bristly, paranoid, brutally self-critical corporal prefers to do things herself. She does—you know she most certainly does—but right now, that is auxiliary to the point. With Ms. Woeburne, this is simply a need to be sure.

"Upstairs. Mr. LaCroix left a notice for you." He glanced at the computer. She could see, beneath the nice suit jacket and passable tie, a bulge of a gun right over his breast. "The Prince wasn't expecting you, per se. But if you have business, I'll file your request and send you up."

Woeburne gave one hard, nodding, spring-green blink, the folder of the hour pressed beneath her arm. She did not carry a gun tonight, but there was no telling, from the crisp sear of her look, what other dangerous things the Ventrue might hold. "No need. I'll deliver it to him myself. Thank you."

"All right. If there's anything else you need," he offered—lovely disposition, hollow heart, happy-to-help. "Let me know."

Her mouth crinkled into a meaningless, millisecond smile. "Goodnight."

It is a world of colorless people, codeless soldiers, and talkers who—for a price—will aid you in whatever way you'd like.

And it is fifteen, twenty steps up the marbled stairs and into a cold elevator. S.W. rode it alone to the penthouse floor. Her body was a construct of parallel shoulders, forward-facing feet, a dividing line of backbone. Her mood was unenthusiastic and a little bit short. Joelle was doubtlessly waiting up there, plotting; she'd want to micromanage the event, to handle the details, to pick out her seats and circles, possibly perform. _'Vulture,'_ Ms. Woeburne thought, but with the vents in this Tower making her hands uncomfortably, unseasonably cold, knew it was a self-indulgent word.

She stepped out of the lift and into the hallway. She squeezed her knuckles—hard, bracingly, as though to crack them—and held the parcel in both sharp, bony, clean-nail hands.

Primogen were gossiping. You could count that chicken. The Toreador were buzzing, the Giovanni were trading whispers behind their napkins, and Lefevre was probably making tailoring overtures for a new shade of red. This last thought sort of irked the hell out a junior-trooper who dressed in office grayscale and did not tease her hair.

But, of course, Ms. Woebune's time is better served fretting about her late report than the couture of undeath.

It had been a curious request, honestly—and, more honestly, the most difficult detective stunt she'd pulled off in recent history, LA or otherwise. Generally, S.W. liked to fix any one problem in the span of a week. That left you six days (minus Thursdays, which she hated, for their halfwayness) to operate. Two for assessment; one for action; two to kiss the rings, bandage the papercuts and hammer out the dents of your devices; one to make a note. Her turnaround was brief, brisk, straight-to-the-point.

Not this time. Nope—Ms. Woeburne spent damn near three weeks on it. She burned through nineteen days squinting at maps, scraping up addresses, and hanging on telephone conversations to piece together the folder-in-question. In Ventrue Standard Time, it was poor performance. In LaCroix Time, that might as well have been the entire fiscal year.

Well, it wasn't like she'd been slacking. Wiggle that out of your head right now. Foremen worth the pint of their recruitment know better than to drag their heels on a Prince; Ms. Woeburne had served hers for decades, and in that time, became painfully aware of how little he appreciated anticipation. She wasn't a damned miracle-worker, however. If Sebastian wanted exact coordinates to an exact Leopold outpost, there wasn't much to say—not besides "lid the pot and wait a spell."

Not that Ms. Woeburne would dare tell Mr. LaCroix so, mind you. The corporal from Hendon wasted her mornings sifting through littoral maps, skipping e-mails from Venture, wondering whether or not she was about to be dismissed. Well, not really. Not that, exactly, you know, so to speak.

Sebastian would never fire her. The very idea was a laugh.

S.W. knew far too much about the muddled inner workings of this corporation. Ms. Woeburne handled the two-cent diplomacy, quartered the data. She dusted out the good china and made it look presentable. She managed the littlest soldiers and got them standing all in-line. She was there for you to ask her things, to hide away the ugly deals that fall down the company chutes, to kick a little cover-up over that not-so-legal mess—she'd been picked out, polished up, sent scurrying. There is no way on earth she would be permitted to stop. There is no way in hell she will ever leave the LaCroix Foundation. There is just no conceivable plan.

Ms. Woeburne confidently makes this claim. He would almost certainly kill her, instead.

Which was why it was probably prudent to go fast, not slow.

She left that thought behind her, let the steel lift doors slide shut and _ding_ it away. Now here is a trip that is already growing familiar: one quick jaunt, stalkish and unsmiling, down the top-floor hall—and don't smile at _anyone_ ; that's key; that's not something she says casually—over the imperial-woven rug, through the gold-on-white, between the narrow window glass and these menacingly tall walls.

Less familiar was the discontent group of musicians stuck waiting there. It was a dour line of suitcases, dufflebags and sports coats shut outside Mr. LaCroix's office, awkward in this pristine blast of beachrock cream. They were trying to look busy but failing. One of them wanted to question the new face, but got a hard, minty dose of Ventrue eye and her swept palm instead. Woeburne told them to haul their equipment aside with some short-tempered difficulty.

"No, no. This won't do," the Foreman knew, without needing to know much more. "This won't do at all. The walkway must be open. Move yourselves—your things—to the side. Prop them up against the wall. Now, please. Now."

The auditionees weren't pleased about it—just being ordered, like so, like a handful of patio furniture. They resented her attitude and being made to move. But they did as the officer asked them, because wouldn't you?

With the corridor clear—clearer, at least—it was a good enough job to go in. Ms. Woeburne didn't even bother wondering about the why. Being Ms. Woeburne, after all—current majordomo around these parts—she pushed by that throng, arranged like holiday trees against the paneling, sandwiching her portfolio case between bicep and elbow. _Good enough, will have to do._ A jostled bass clarinet player muttered unkindly after her before two large doors cracked open, closed, and shut everything outside off.

The interior of LaCroix's penthouse turned out no less weird than the hall leading up to it. Inside, S.W. found her Prince—back towards the exit, hollering at a triad of insulted, indistinctive kine who shrank behind wood instruments. Joelle sat passively nearby, a pair of cherry-red trousers and preposterous milk chiffon, sheet music piled on her lap like a pretty perched canary. Ms. Woeburne decided she'd interrupted something unimportant.

Appearing "unimportant" did not mean this scene was any less of a cakewalk to detest, and the scene was plain, laid out there between the incoming file and the outgoing lurch. Ms. Lefevre, Prince LA, and the unfortunate violinists were floundering through a rehearsal. And—judging from the uneasiness—none of it was going particularly well. Mr. LaCroix's annoyance had collapsed into shouting at least ten minutes, two ensembles ago, and there is no one better than S.M. Woeburne to tell you that a shouting Prince means the situation is only going south from here.

Well, if she'd strolled into the tower tonight expecting this nonsense, Woeburne might've scheduled an audience for the first time in her life.

The Foreman considered her Sire. You could see his reflection in the dangerous blue-black of those bay windows. Unpitying eyebrows forked towards the small-boned bridge of his nose, nacreous complexion intensified by anger, colors as white-and-gold as the building's bones. The Ventrue's fingers were snapping a few inches away from one player's nose. She had tried to argue with him. S.W. felt a mite of empathy for her. Poor girl; how could she know?

Joelle knew, though, no matter how blasé and uninterested that preening creature looked, sitting there with both hands clasped demurely in her lap. Mlle. Lefevre, who in life had been—believe it or not; Ms. Woeburne wouldn't tell you what to do—a folk singer of some local applause, pounced at the chance to exhibit herself for a manorful of A-listers. _'Vainglorious stork,'_ S.W. thought automatically. _'Fancies herself a Daughter of Cacophony.'_ And they were playing Italian opera. God, how apposite and awful.

' _Well, in for a penny,'_ she told herself, as someone's auntie often said. Ms. Woeburne stepped forward to interrupt the mincemeat Mr. LaCroix was making of those musicians. She gave the colorless hem of her turtleneck a straightening tug and stood behind him like any paltry lieutenant might. The tense lines of Sebastian's dark suit were creeping up on his ear lobes. S.W. did not let that bother her. She cleared her throat into a fist and fitted on an appropriate scowl.

"Mr. LaCroix. Good evening." Ms. Woeburne announced herself. Practice made her language crisp and her voice loud. The ancilla's demeanor was firm and neat, and at her side, a victory was packaged just as neatly—ready to be dissembled, scrutinized, approved. "Excuse the intrusion. But I've brought your reports."

The Prince whirled his bad temper on her for a heartbeat's duration—coldwater stare, fencing for blood. But it was only Ms. Woeburne, he saw quickly. It was only the small, domestic charge, and on the other hand was the more pressing business of destroying a few more inadequate people he could do without.

Ms. Woeburne felt a bit chagrined. She waited for a good six minutes, sighing loudly while Mr. LaCroix screamed, checking her wrist watch, pursing her lips. She didn't-listen to only so many condescending instructions. She made a second attempt.

"Sir," Woeburne cut in when it seemed he had finally finished ranting. Both hands were clasped politely behind her waist. The coldness of her belt metal lent them a sharper air. He was still facing the opposite way, and she was left speaking, unamusedly, with his back. "You asked for information on the Society? I have it ready for you."

Mr. LaCroix shot his corporal half-a-glare. You could see resentment busy at work behind the bland professionalism that face forced. "Yes, right; of course. Fine. It's about time," the Prince muttered. Offhand gratitude, at best, but she was used to it. A thumb flicked in the direction of his unoccupied desk. "Just set it over there somewhere, would you?"

Ms. Woeburne frowned.

Foremen do not complain over the minor bruises. Foremen do not bicker when their ships shore short of coming in. So the Foreman sucked up a shot of bitterness, puffed a lungful of air, and trotted over to the place that had been regulated for her vital little works.

"All right," she said—that only. It was all right. S.W. flopped the red folder onto his desk with a particularly sulking _'whap!'_

By no means did she intend on dallying long enough to join Joelle. The absurd woman waggled her fingers _hello_ , grinning with animosity, a smack of dismissal that came easily to her as lying did. Ms. Woeburne managed one curt nod. Her lips were pressed into a blueberry and she about-faced for the door. _'It figures. It does. Why I bother to expect anything at all by now, I don't know. But I'm sorry—what a waste of my very expensive time and effort.'_

All that said, and all that anger right where it always was, S.W.'s sympathy for the players was legitimate. They'd done the piece perfectly, they said, as it ought to be done, but she knew Prince LA's version of perfection didn't often match yours. "Mediocrity," he told them, and she also knew how that word _mediocrity_ burned.

The woman who spoke was long-haired and pretty in the way of people too courageous for their profession. She chased off a grimace by looking blank-faced. Her voice floated weakly. She bit her tongue. "That's the tempo. We can speed it up..."

"Could you, I wonder, slow down? I would think you'd have to be dead."

"Yeah, honestly, we usually play it slower." (S.W. winced. There is a vicarious pain in watching your father berate another child, and LaCroix was nothing like hers, but like her, these were one more set of people he had booked for a service. She hoped they'd stop talking there, but you know they never do.)"Weddings, things like that. Don't get me wrong; we can change the tempo. I am trying to understand what you want me to do," the player promised, clearly, her impatience prickly, pride making chest muscles tight. But—" (And, as Ms. Woeburne would say, this part is the clincher; this bit is key.) "—I don't think we're sure what it is you're asking for."

Your job in a court is finding the best way to give your king what he asks for.

It is like this with the Ventrue, and with Mr. LaCroix. Part of the challenge is understanding each other. There are ideas, moods, zeitgeists, and nuances that shift between the ages; there are hurtles, spots of decay, lost idioms between our new, modern way of talking and their antiquated, Elder one. A lot changes in some two hundred years. There's more at work than can be solved by simply asking, by dropping your subtlety and just saying _what_? You don't say _what_ to your king. So good corporals learn to listen in certain fashions, with certain senses, to capture what is lost in translation. They attempt to empathize, guess, and decode so that—with a little preparation—they are correctly able to analyze, act, and respond.

If you are young—or even if, like Ms. Woeburne, you are not too young at all—even if you've been doing this for what seems like a very long time—you will have to try hard to understand.

 

* * *

 

 _What are you asking for? What do you want?_ These questions are not hers. These are the questions of people—young people—who ask a Ventrue what he wants, and they are people too small to know that none of them are.

" _I'm not sure what you're asking for," she told him. She was waiting. Ms. Woeburne was twenty-nine years old._

" _Then perhaps you should pay better attention. What I'm offering you is a mentorship. You should appreciate what this says about your character. And you should recognize the import of this arrangement."_

_Ms. Woeburne, her back straight—but not so straight as it is now; not so correct; not so militant—her eyes peeled, her cells warm and aging, watched the ink move across the contract. It was a confidentiality agreement. The blue was cold; the printer-fresh paper was still hot. Every letter tick the man made was abrupt; flawless penmanship, generous offer, but somehow both were empty. There was a nothingness radiating out from behind Mr. LaCroix's desk. He did not look at her as he wrote._

_She had no idea. Perhaps she should have._

_"You sign here, please," he instructed, pointing to a blank line beneath two towering initials._ SL. _She was not certain what any of it meant or if it was something she had wanted, but there seemed no other option by then, standing there, in this office, with her coat hanging on a wall tack and her file cracked open on the polished oak. She was already this far. She wasn't sure, but he was. There was ease in that arrangement. So long as one of them was sure._

" _Could I look it over, do you think? Do you think that I could give it quick review?"A look-over, a review—this is really most of what Ms. Woeburne wants today. "It's only that I don't want to promise something I can't deliver. I want to be exact. I want to be completely sure."_

_"Take it with you and think on it if you must. You've done good work, Ms. Woeburne. You've done well, you've been loyal, and I would like to give you more in recognition of those services. But understand this is the one time I will ask you. And understand that I will not wait on you for very long."_

" _I understand," she said. "An hour," she said. "I should have made my decision by then."_

_And that was how she'd signed away her life—because his writing, like him, seemed sure._

 

* * *

 

"Ms. Woeburne," Lefevre remembered. It startled the Foreman out of her head and back into this office—back where it is paper, tie knots, clean stone and mighty wood.

Yes. What, she said. Didn't she?

The Toreador's tone was like a sugar bowl sprinkled in arsenic. S.W. had not wanted to stop on her way to the door, but it was too late now. "I forgot to tell you something. Could you come here? There was a call to your extension this evening; Ms. Gutierrez is looking for you. She is recruiting the lawn security and would like to know how you screen applicants at Mssr. LaCroix's estates."

The Ventrue blinked. You could have used Ms. Woeburne's shoulders—or, perhaps, the bone line in her neck—as a way to measure the divide between countries, the few inches of fieldgrass that determine a war. Joelle's hands were folded casually, beautifully, in her too-scarlet lap. The man whose safety they were planning—the politician yelling at the artist—had an off-time metronome ticking in his head.

"She called here for that? Tom didn't mention this to me. Why?"

"To have a conversation with you, of course. It must have slipped his mind."

"Well, the process is on file. I made that record available years ago. Philip Nelson probably has it at the Landa office."

"That's not really the same thing, is it," Joelle noticed.

Ms. Woeburne stared—bitter, unhappy, a block of ice cut-out with a saw.

"Send her the file," Ms. Woeburne said.

Lefevre turned her head and smiled distantly, adorably, like they had a secret. "As you say"—because, between the Toreador and the Ventrue, this is how speaking always is.

All in all, S.W. was not having a very nice night.

Some—who had less experience, fewer years—might expect bigger tells from Mr. LaCroix. He was a volatile and hypercritical Jyhadist, occasionally fickle, but generally what she found to be a predictable personality. And no matter how much she trusted her ability to read those tells (a little, but not much), Ms. Woeburne never, do you know, just inquired about his business. It was not hers. That is really all you need to know.

That said, there is nothing to keep you from guessing—for backup plans, for the challenge, for fun. So, if you asked S.W. to make a guess (something she tries not to do; she's terrible at it; she finds it an offensive game to play), hers would be that Sebastian wanted this data so he could plan a purge. They'd had trouble with hunters in the suburbs, near as Hollywood. He might send a contingent (or his Sheriff) to snipe Leopold's outposts when they toed too near the Los Angeles demarcation lines. Just as well. Let that be someone else's gristly issue. None of it was in her job description. It was only Ms. Woeburne's when it needed to be discreet.

And since there was nothing else for her here—since her work was finished and her papers turned in—Ms. Woeburne turned to go. She had correspondence to see to. She was running late for something else. These are the kinds of things she says to people, partially true, because there is only so much you can stand of this place, and there is only so much you can bear of faces like Tom, Joelle, Roderick, her.

She was mostly outside when the notes went wrong—harrowing, punitive, and seconds too soon.

It was a ghastly noise. It is violence to hear music broken back into sounds, into raw cuts of meat, what you'd call components. Nails, winches, pins. There is a frustration and a tragedy to the deconstruction of art. It might, if you are an officer of some lower class than Ms. Woeburne's—and, perhaps, if you aren't lower at all—rattle parts of you. It might give you cause for concern. And it might—even if you are her exact rank; her exact position; if you were _her_ , exactly—it just might, with your polished boot heel already through the getaway door, pull on your rifle strap, stop you sharp.

It didn't matter what Mr. LaCroix said. They were fine musicians. The violin was a fine one, too; red and wailing; the kind you use with brushstrokes. And Ms. Woeburne's ear was untrained, because she'd never been a creator, and she'd never had much imagination. No, not enough; not when it mattered. But nothing seemed amiss until her Sire took that bow.

She flinched. It stung. It was not like music; it lifted all the fine hairs up her back.

You can weaponize anything, the Ventrue have learned. You can take a beauty mark and make it like bullets. You can stitch a march together with needle-point, paint the ideal blood color, make poetry from the urge to do better and take more than everybody else. His posture was the same as theirs; the mechanics were the same; the tools were fiber and horsehair. And this was just a demonstration—just fifteen seconds to show a few musicians how a Ventrue thinks they ought to keep time—yet there was something different. There was something vinegar about the impeccable _C_. Something harmful, like salt or gunpowder. It was chemical precipitate. It was hollowness, a lack of life energy, but it was one Ms. Woeburne was not able to describe. He was terrible, really. He was awful and old and precise.

It didn't look right, she told herself. It didn't look like anything someone less clever, someone less smart, would've thought of as human, or anything a king's good soldier should need so badly to please.

 

* * *

 

_Those were her words._

_It didn't look right._

_Decades earlier—months earlier—some long time before she put her pen to that paper, Ms. Woeburne had seen it. She could not have guessed what "it" was, but the woman had looked, and had smelled, and had prickled at the electrons of that wrongness. She had identified without ever needing to precisely understand. Maybe she would have been able to describe it for you, then—that absence, a phantom itch, like lopping off a limb—how you sense that a dead thing is dead. It gapes in Ms. Woeburne now, too—a mothhole in the burlap of a soul, a place to wiggle your fingers through—and so you can't expect the dead thing to explain. It's cruel of you. They don't lack the words, but they do lack the context, and that is irreplaceable flesh; it is a muscle, like the brain or the heart, that cannot regenerate, and will not heal what it has lost._

_She remembers, though. That is a price of being grown, but not grown-enough. She remembers much of it, much more too well. Filter beans; boredom. Summer trees in the park, apple cores, flowers rotting off the cherries in July. The taste in the air on an MTA railcar. Ladybeetle bites, reddish bumps on the terrain of a calf, forearm, stomach. She tries to push these things out of her mind's eye, but what can you do? You cannot stop a person from remembering things. You can't rinse every bit clean and rewrite yourself. Not just like that._

_She can still dredge up the night. If she wanted to, she could. Except it isn't a dredge—it's a flick, like a light switch, ready to on-off at a radar blip. If she does not distract herself, it's easy to find. A bad dream, a long flight, one interrupting thought, and here it is:_

_Ms. Woeburne, sitting at a café table, fingertips sore around a pencil nub, ignorant in the way that only humans are._

_She had been working. She was busy—what she imagined qualified as "busy" at the time. And because Ms. Woeburne is always busy, and always has work, she had not noticed how the coffeehouse waxed and waned around her. She hadn't noticed her wristwatch in some time. She had not noticed the weight settle in an empty plastic chair, a coat sleeve on the table, or a man who sat suddenly across from her._

_It took the squeak of Styrofoam pushed across varnish. She did not want company. She glanced up, unstartled, in a way that sort of sliced._

" _No," Ms. Woeburne said, cringing mildly, incidentally. A tall cup stood on the table. Espresso, something basic. Its scent was uninviting, too Spartan. She did not look at the man—not really. He was vaguely sickly and unromantically blond and very pale. She was not amicable to entertaining anyone else in a tie. "That's kind. But no. No thank you."_

 _It was clearly supposed to be the end of it_ —thank you, no. _The suit did not retreat. It said: "I think you will want to hear this."_

 _She hadn't bothered to really look. She was prepared to be very annoyed. She scowled through the coffee steam, and she'd tried to be fierce, but the eyes are what got her. There was something not right there. There was a darkness to the pupil that threatened to cross_ into _—to see all possible moves, to have done something terrible, to choke-chain a presence she could not explain._

 _Now_ that _. That is something Ms. Woeburne can explain now. It is the way the Ventrue have become what they are._

" _You don't know who I am, do you?" the man asked._

_She said no. I don't._

 

* * *

 

When you become what they are, you learn a certainty of motion. You learn how to look _sure_.

Jyhad is a muddle of mythos and agendas. Its poeticisms contain grains of truth, and though the metaphors are often dramatic, some of them resonate. Dead things have no senses. Un-dead have a different set. But even in the reddest apple of life, you can't learn a feeling; you cannot be told a passion; you either have it, or you do not. Interests change, motives change—but this is one of the facts that, whatever you are, does not evolve, and it is not bred out, and it has not become something new.

You can learn how to look sure. If you can learn how to _be_ sure, Ms. Woeburne does not know; she only knows she has not learned that one yet.

Sebastian LaCroix doesn't stumble or hesitate in any endeavor he makes. His bearing is unimpeachable; his efforts are frighteningly conscious and clipped to the second. No sluggish, sloppy, sleepy sounds; decisive combustion, distinction and measure. The arms were strident and forced. The man's face was inexpressive. He played like a sharp-shooter and the high chords tweaked the tendons up Ms. Woeburne's neck.

It was not very good. He was not very good, truly; it was an unfinished couple of notes, something incomplete. Yet he made no mistakes. She could not explain why.

Weaker clans cosset their Childer. Weaker clans suckle babies, make them into pups, coddled by sentimentality and tender reassurances. S. Woeburne woke up in a medical bed. Sebastian LaCroix, once-upon-a-time, was lucky to have woken up, at all.

Ventrue are born with what they need. Ventrue do not require reeducation. Ventrue are well-schooled, in culture and in warfare, but there is something absent in their perfection; there is something definitely human it lacks.

Art and passion are rote. Ventrue do not need these. Ventrue choose not to feel, cannot create, do not dream. They draw lines, and that has not changed.

 

* * *

 

_The first thing Ms. Woeburne felt when her new mind began to clear was the cold._

_Cold light, cold brainmatter, cold subconscious to wade through. Cold sterile sheets, cold white pillows, cold tubes feeding into her. Cold hands, wherever they were. They were all cold, but they were surpassed by one singular, richer sense of that word: some deep, primeval Cold. Something that expanded; something that, like a monster, demanded its capital-C. She could not name it. She did not try._

_Ms. Woeburne blinked, but couldn't see. Her head pounded. Her skin seemed inelastic. She couldn't remember what happened; there were no familiar voices, gently explaining the accident, injury, attack, whatever it was that clocked her into plastic-wrapped bedding and these barren walls. There were no voices, at all. It smelled like iodine. Overhead, one hospital bag dangled from a rack; god, had blood ever been so red? She traced it to an IV taped to her left wrist. Someone had to have done that. She thought about hollering for them, but couldn't; there was a dryness swelling; it was cotton up her throat, deadening the tissue, dehydrating the lips._

_Ms. Woeburne dissected the parameters of herself. She felt tendrils, sticking, felt her feverish brow. She felt the bare light bulbs pinching her pupils small. Her chest! Her chest crushed in on itself, and what she could_ not _feel was oxygen, a wind moving in-then-out. It was all thick—terribly, one-thousand leagues thick, from the liquid in her tear ducts to the stuff in her veins._ 'Don't panic,' _she told herself._ 'You're breathing; you're alive. They've drugged you. You're in an emergency room. Calm down. Sort it out—what happened before this? Think. Something happened. Something must have. Something always does.'

_Thinking did not push away the cloudiness. She struggled to see something, squinting towards the crinkly lump of coverlet over her feet, like pawing through fog. She could not make it logical. There were footsteps, pattering in her ear canals, chasing out anything else that might've come in. S.W. stared emptily at an indecipherable chin above a collared shirt. It was no one she knew. No one with a name—not one that meant a thing to her—but he was looking. He touched three frigid fingers to her throat, counted silently, then lifted a phone to one ear._

" _Mr. LaCroix," the chin said, intangible, unimportant to her. "It was successful. She's waking up."_

_Mr. LaCroix._

_Sebastian LaCroix._

_Ms. Woeburne could not remember being hurt. She had never been seriously hurt. So it seemed reasonable to her, then, not to have memories of being crushed in an automobile collision, or being shot, or being stabbed and left for dead, or a hundred other everyday moviehouse horrors that put people in these positions. But she remembered Mr. LaCroix. He had been in a coat. They were outside. He had been holding a taxi;_ good evening _; the brusque tug of a car door, and her eyes were open here. She could not recall anything else. She did not know if she'd been coming or going._

 _Ms. Woeburne winced, virgin teeth clamping numbly within her mouth._ Think _, she insisted. But the thought—the only one she had to fall back on—was that name. It said nothing. It did not touch her. But it triggered a Pavlov bolt of loyalty she could not account for, and still cannot explain._

 

* * *

 

Carnivores with tools. Expired art. An executive's handshake, bitterly ice; Ms. Woeburne's blank reassurances, prickly half-friendship, her criticisms; a French Revolution marcher who could not play his strings well anymore.

The bow dropped off. There was no closure or transition. It died in an aria at an obtrusive, unsettling half-note; the instrument leapt away, and it was useless, an emptied gun, thrust to anyone who'd catch it. Somebody did.

"If that's what you want," the player said. "If that's what you want, we can do it. But—"

No, that was all. There's no use for excuses. _But_ is a staple in Ms. Woeburne's natural language, when she delivers excuses or reasons for coming up short. But it's a very simple formula, really, with Princes. Either you can do it, or you can't.

Finished with the demonstration because he was finished with everyone, Mr. LaCroix took S.W.'s Leopold report off his desk, turned around, and shoved through gilt double-doors far ahead of her. She did not follow for a while. No one knew precisely what to do.

"I suppose we should just leave," the bravest player said.

"Yes," Ms. Woeburne agreed. "You should definitely leave."

"I guess someone will call us, then."

The musicians chewed their inner cheeks. Joelle tapped staccato onto her delicate collarbone. S.W., assiduous, but inadequate, could offer only her usual. All she had was a cynical, one-half shrug to satisfy them.

"I'm sorry to say: I don't make all the decisions. I don't make all the calls," she admitted, because—when it is not discreet, routine, or by-the-book—Ms. Woeburne will be the first to tell you: she's never been perfect enough to know anything, at all.

 _"I don't understand why this is so impossible for you,"_ Sebastian would mutter, and—whether he knew it or not—always looked so dismally sure of the less-than-perfect eyes that followed him out.


	41. Re: Morbid Curiosities

**TO: ROZALIN GREENE**  
**FROM: CLAUDIA FAIRHOLM**  
**DATE: JULY 8 2010 1:02 AM**  
**SUBJECT: STRANGE LITTLE WHISPERINGS**

 

Rozalin!

 

Nine or ten sorries for not writing sooner. I’ve been a busy lady; the rumors are true. But you know this already! Knowing me as you do. I’m just on a Hollywood tear this month. Poor Isaac; he’s being so outmaneuvered by we lowly poseurs lately. (You are my smartest friend, so I don’t need to ask whether or not you know about the large, rocky, and spectacularly edgy Grauman’s situation.) Oh, well! At least he still has his autograph book to look back upon fondly, and the cold, staticy comfort of the silver screen. A pragma-romantic Tsk.

You were right about Gary & friends all along, by the way. (But of courrrrse, you say, fluffing your feather boa. Tapping your cane!) No direct word from him, naturally—not to me, anyway. His loss! Have you ever met someone who cared so much about a few pimples? For a Sewer Rat, he squeaks about his complexion like a schoolgirl.

I even hope he’s reading this. (Just in case: bonjour, ¡salud!, guten tag, salaam, Gary! Much love, xoxoxo.)

I’m sure Baron Hollywood is broken to bits about their absence—to seek my advice on things, of all his favorite people. What’s a Toreador without a walking literary foil following him around, shambling, sneering? But! I imagine that’s enough Nosferating for one letter. If I carry on like this much longer, I’ll wind up on the Net, photoshopped onto a Victoria’s teeny-weeny shoot. Why those sweaty little men seem to think that’s an aspersion upon _our_ character, I’ll never know.

I suppose they can’t all be my poor friend Rama. Well, maybe they could, but they’d all be dead.

Then what use, I ask you!

How interesting that you should mention Master Strauss the other day when—just tonight!—who comes a-knocking at my chamber door but a rising young star of the Angeles Chantry. He sent a few inquisitors my way last week. They did ask about what contact I’d had with Prince LaCroix as of late, and I’d nothing but disappointment for them. Given all the backtalk in Hollywood right now, I thought it would be best to turn them away—and I did—but they weren’t especially pushy, Roz, so I didn’t lose any sleep over it.

But tonight! Tonight was odd. The fine young lady who knocked mentioned this would be the Chantry’s last visit to me. But before she left, it was impressed upon me, in no uncertain terms, how welcome I am to call her master at any time with any “new or alarming” changes.

Changes in what? I dare not ask a Wizard that question; would you?

The peculiar thing, of course, isn’t hospitality overtures from the Tremere. (At least, not in this instance). It’s that she made it no secret our little chat—and whatever I might have to say—should be made in confidence. You don’t suppose our dear, curious old Max stuck his finger too far into a Prince’s burrow and came out with a scorpion attached? It seems too gauche, for him.

Then again, the man heel-bounces about LA in a beet-red Wachowski Sisters coat, so who am I to presuppose.

Yours in the Matrix,

 

Claudicat  
(I love it.)


	42. Groupthink

E held Lily's computer, ring finger over the power _off_ , deciding.

It wasn't unusual for him to feel like this. Like he was tightrope walking a fine line of guilt, because if E wasn't insecure, he was what you might call suspicious. The shadow of his hands across the keyboard looked like failure. He wasn't this guy. He wasn't some shutterbug flipping through text messages or lunging to answer the phone. He'd rather batten down the hatches than blow them sky-high. Eugene Walker had always been a nice guy.

Which was why it put a surreal taste in his mouth to be sitting here holding Lily's things. He didn't really want to see it, almost. But he was worried, and he had cause to be, E swore—real, solid, flesh-and-blood cause. And he was troubled, and he was tired of sitting up, a wee-hour vigil, wondering exactly when the apartment door would open. So maybe you can understand for yourself why he had to know.

Feeling like a covetous lover, the thin-blood stilled, pursed his lips, and flipped open an unread e-mail.

 

* * *

 

**TO: LILY**   
**FROM: DAMSEL**   
**DATE: AUGUST 2 2010 3:12 AM  
SUBJECT: you left your stuff here**

 

So I guess Slim is too hot shit to answer her phone these days but you left some crap on the bar. Maybe I'll try to keep it safe for you.

Nines just got in, says sorry he missed you but we have our own business. Want a job? He needs to see you ASAP, tomorrow if you can. Call me when you get this so I can tell him you'll show.

Tomorrow, Cam

CALL ME

310.342.1230

 

DAMSEL

 

* * *

 

E shut the laptop, and his relief was lukewarm.

She had brought home a gun. Eight days ago, Lily—his Lily—had brought home a fucking gun, a bump stuffed under her shirt like she'd smuggled a secret. There were no bullets in it. That mattered less, somehow, than how she announced it, showed E the empty cylinder, and giggled. _"It's K-Al's,"_ she laughed. _"J_ _ust an old spare. He told me to see how it feels keeping one on me. If I like it, maybe I'll get my own."_

Every night she went:

" _E, you're going to lose your mind when you hear this."_

" _Nines says the Camarilla is a pyramid scheme, and the only reason we don't have more market regulation is because there are a bunch of money-hungry Kindred pulling strings behind the—"_

" _I'm not even kidding. America probably would never have existed if the Brujah didn't—"_

" _It affects all of us, even thin-bloods, even humans. Nines says things could be better for everyone if the Free-State—"_

" _—Ventrue only ever got a foothold in LA because they had their last leader murdered. Nines says they let the Kuei-jin—"_

" _—and the Reagan administration—"_

Politics are filthy. Politics are stolen oil, burnt hair, the run-off behind the pharmacy plant. Politics are what they are, and that kind of filth is constant; by itself, studied academically, it's not frightening. Frightening is the fervor with which the mouth of the woman he loves speaks. Frightening is how her eye whites light up with some kind of heat. They look like book-burner eyes when they get like that. They look like bones at the gut of a furnace. E wouldn't have called them those things, but there are some truths you see because you want to, and others you let smolder out, pinching your nose shut, praying for something to wash them away.

The thin-blood stared at their checkered wall-clock for a long while, waiting to hear keys in a door. There was a knot in E's throat. His elbows began to hurt, propped there on the knees of the sunshine-yellow pajama pants he wore around. E didn't want to do this; really, he did not; but when you are anxious enough that the hours start to melt, and you begin to see there's no other choice.

A long time went by. Maybe it wasn't so long. Maybe it was already late—late enough that he felt old, like all his arteries were thinning, like a wick burrowing into candlewax. E sat there thinking, not thinking, and then the lock turned. He jumped up, and he moved towards that little sound, and he flung open the door with unnecessary strength, with no sense of how hard its hinges banged.

Lily was standing on the other side. Her freckled face was sallow in surprise.

"Wow. Hi. What are you doing up?" She was blinking herself into normalcy. There was a purse between her clammy hands, and she smelled powerfully of cigarette smoke and the other things he'd come to recognize as being Brujah, of a dozen people's heritage, too many animals to make sense. "I figured you'd already be asleep. Hope I didn't wake you."

"It's four-fifteen in the morning!" exploded before he could think up anything better to say.

"Yeah, I know. Sorry. I didn't mean to be so late. Time got away from me." Her shoulders hunched in their normal self-conscious way as she slid past E and into the canola oil aroma of home. She looked like Lily; she was regular again. The hallway nightlights glowed in the memory of his eyelids even when they closed. Bioluminescence, an imprint of something you know is still there when it's hard to see. He should have had it out right there—it was a good lead-in, an ajar door. He should have said something meaningful that would shake her awake. But there was something discolored on Lily's face, and it distracted him. "Just let me hop in the shower and then we'll go to bed, OK?"

"Is that mascara?" he asked.

"I guess?"

Lily turned there, faced him and touched her eye. There were black half-moons smudged there thick as your pinky. They reminded him of combat stripes, of a football player. She looked like someone trying to look tough. She winced, and pulled the bottom of her lid as though the texture there confused her, too. "I guess?"

There are two kinds of craziness in an animal's eyes: the kind ready to kill, and the kind ready to die. Lily had always looked like something that might die. With extra color on her face, though, she looked meaner somehow—spooky like somebody else. They left residue on her fingerprint he'd find on the pillows another night.

"It's a hair's length from sun-up. It's dangerous out. Where were you?"

"Nowhere special. Same as always." She wiped the liner-stained finger in a corner of her rumpled t-shirt and then he had her back. Lily stopped at their dining table, unpacking her bag: cell phone, key ring, spearmint chapstick. You could see the largest bones moving beneath her skin. He didn't know if she had bought the gun or not. He didn't know.

"Lily. You look like a mess and you reek like a bar. You can't go walking around like that."

"Excuse me?"

"By yourself, I mean. We talked about this. We all talked about it," he told her. _Safety in numbers_ , they'd said. Five of them: E, Lily, Julius, Copper, Rosa. It was a tiny house tied tight by the things they couldn't do.

"Damsel drove me." He caught her in the lie.

"This is making me crazy," he said, because he didn't want to say anything else—not _you're full of it_ , not _is that so_. "Can you just stop? Stop fussing and look at me!"

E's hands turned to paws around Lily's biceps when they touched, sweatier than a nice guy's should have been, about-facing her. She looked at him like a startled baby doll. If you were to tip her back, those lids, black and messy, would have blinked. Dull teeth peeked around the curve of her slack upper lip.

"E, Jesus. It was just an accident," she mumbled, his thumbs pushing into her underarm. "There was a lot going on tonight. I'll get home earlier next time. Take a breath," Lily told him, and there was nothing else to do that would've shown how desperate he was. She said breathe.

"I don't want to talk about this," E ground out. His front teeth were too tight to grimace or persuade her. "I don't want you going over there anymore. I never liked this. I think it's a bad goddamn idea."

"Calm down." Good grief, that look: hazel, ovular; the gloss of a toddler with one hand caught in the cookie jar. She broke the barricade of arms by bringing up her elbows, and placed both palms over his shoulders. Her fingers squeezed. They were tense and clammy. It was a frank, placating gesture—uncharacteristically mature—especially for Lily Harris, who sounded like a fifth grader when she argued and about fourteen when she laughed. "Listen to me, E. I am fine. I was a little late. I didn't check my watch. I'm not—"

"You're not what?" He wanted to hear.

"Not sure how to tell you that it's OK. Everything is OK; it's fine. I am." E couldn't process it. He swallowed around the swell of his cold, sour tongue. "Look, I know you care. And I'm glad you do. I'm glad you say so. But you're getting pretty weird about it lately, and I think—"

"Weird? Are you kidding me? You're never around here; how the hell could it get weird?"

"Oh, come on, Bee."

He took a step backwards, gut reaction. The three feet of space snared her face up in something that looked like fear. "For Chrissakes, Lily," he choked. He took a breath. He made another lurched, convictionless step away, watching the thing that looked like fear morph to anger somewhere between her nose, mouth, eyes. "Don't petname me. I'm pissed at you. And I'm worrying myself sick about it. Give me a break. Just give me a minute."

It was a plea and it irritated her. She hovered there, over their slumping futon couch, nervously plucking apart the shaggy corners of a hideous throw-pillow. Teal unthreaded in her hands.

"Can't you try to understand what I'm saying? You're gone all hours, I've got no idea where half the time; the only thing I'm sure of is that you're with them. Stop; wait a minute. Just hear me out," he managed before she could interrupt. "Lily, they sound great. _Sound_ great. But think about this. Really think about it."

"I never tried that," she shot back, stiff, knowing it was coming if it wasn't here yet. "Any other suggestions? Got any more brilliant advice for me?"

"That's not what I meant and you know it." She watched him carefully across their motionless apartment, waiting to become enraged. "I'm only saying, is all. Who knows who these people are? Who knows anything about what they say to you?"

Lily's hands fisted. The cushion dropped and hit their studio floor. " _They_ are my friends," she announced, a flatboard of a voice. Too little time and friends you don't really know: that's a story for both of them, behind them. So much can be done to you by friendly faces you don't really know. "Look, you're mad I didn't call. Fine; it's my fault. Why are you acting so stupid about it?"

If someone tells you the Step One to independence is to strap on a helmet and pick up a rifle, they are lying to you. If someone tells you _sign up, soldier_ is the ticket to freedom, they are telling you a story. If someone says _give me your attention_ , and what you get is a handful of bullets to be jammed in a gun, then they are pulling out the strings of you, and that's the real thing about lies.

" _I'm_ acting stupid?" He knew it would happen like this. All E's scripts were wrinkling, scattered wide. It was hard not to yell at her. He was over-enunciating. He reminded his body to relax, but it didn't; it coiled, and it all seemed to go haywire. "You're going to get killed. You're probably going to get us both killed; I'm not going to pretend like everything's fine. Because it isn't. It's not fine."

Her face intensified. E's insides were knotty points of nerve, and he couldn't bring himself to care. "You don't know them. You can't tell me I don't. They're—"

"They are vampires, Lily," he shouted, high cheekbones, angles dark.

"No shit? Wow, that explains the capes. And the bat sh—"

"Lily," E. yelled. She stared at him, arms folded, singed. He felt like he was going to maybe cry. "Can you put a fucking lid on that? Can you please?"

She looked like a joke, like a soldier who got caught in the rain.

"So are you," Lily said, again, something she had no words for the first time on a beachfront where once upon a time a girl had to tell a boy what she'd done. Her face, too, was beginning to singe, deepening from runny chalk to the color of diluted fruit punch. It was paler than his. She was closer to being the real thing. "You and I aren't what we used to be, and it isn't going to change. I'm starting to wrap my mind around that. Eventually, you're going to have to accept what you are, and you're going to have to decide what it means."

"Not like that. Not like Ms. Woeburne. Not like her Prince. Not like your son-of-a-bitch Sire," E barked. "That's not our kind. And you're kidding yourself if, after all this, you think there's something they share with us."

"You're talking about the Camarilla." She must've known her Childe wasn't going to hear it; he'd nod, he'd meet eyes with her, but he'd be shoving ghost fingers in the wells of his ears. E's arms were like Lily's, crossed protectively over his chest, the architecture of refusal. But it was no use bowing out now. _Next time's the ringer_ , she'd tell herself, sounding like Mom. She had to try to explain. "We're not the only ones who put up with this. You realize you're not even a fucking speck on their radar, right? That's how much you matter. That's why the Camarilla doesn't give a rat's ass about people like you and me. That's why you need to start—"

"I'm not talking about them! Lily. You know what this is about. They're not on my—"

"Every name on that list you just spat at me? Camarilla. Every time we can't eat in city limits? Camarilla. Every time we aren't-"

"That's Ms. Woeburne you're talking about," E cut in. He didn't feel any particular loyalty to the somber character in suit sleeves and mean shoes; he wouldn't trust her in a dark room with an empty glass; but there was mercy there, something that must matter in a world where _you're trespassing, lick_ and _you can't hunt here_. "You have a good set up. And you're going to clump all that in with the despots because…?"

Lily breathed through her nose. She untangled her arms, and they seemed unreasonably long, flea-bitten brown. All her fingernails were laid into the back of their dilapidated sofa. "Not everyone in the Camarilla is a problem," she said, slowly, pausing to let each word out. "Ms. Woeburne is doing her job. But if she knew I _spoke_ to… I don't want to think about it. She'd fire me," claimed the no-daddy kid who polished her floors. "She'd kick me right out with the rest of them. She might kill me. I don't want to think about it."

"Which is exactly why I'm begging you to let this go. They could blackmail you, sell you out. This could be some kind of test, for all we know."

"In the Camarilla, yes." Lily started to pace now. She rounded an armchair twice. The space between her black eye lines was glistening again with that horrible, jingoistic flame. "It's their fault you think like you do. It's why everyone thinks this way. Like we have to live like fucking cannibals," she spat. He watched his Sire speak. She was so convinced. She had a picture of something vague and closeby in her mind. "The Anarchs are just people. They know the Cam is corrupt and want to fix things. _People_ , E. That's the point. We're different now, but we're still people. We don't have to act like monsters. Not because some fucker who thinks he's a Prince says that's the way it's always been."

"Suddenly you're an expert on this," he steamed, unable to shake the compression coil, that nausea. She sounded alien. Better word: preprogrammed, pop-a-top progressive. "And I'm sure that's fine for them, but that's not us. We have our own problems. We have a lot more problems. It's—"

"Don't you dare tell me it's dangerous, either—like we're safe here with our heads in the sand. We're safer with them than without them. Trust me. That is the only place it's safe," she swore, and before he could argue, threw on a glare of her own, a counterpoint to the way he was looking at her. Lily's eyes were a terrible sort of focused. "You know what? I used to be just like you. I used to be scared to stick my head out my door because maybe someone wouldn't like me, I'd get lost somewhere, or something would happen. But you know what? Nobody fucks with me now. I go over there, nobody eyeballs me. I come home, nothing blows up. You know why? Because I have friends. I have friends who nobody fucks with. The Baron says I get to walk free downtown, then I do, and nothing happens to me. Nothing happens. Because these people look out for each other. I can look out for myself. And sometimes you just have to stop," she seared, pacing, footfalls heavy, a winch of some sharpness going warlike with her face. "You have to stop being so fucking scared—so fucking scared all the time."

E stared at her. There was barely anything to fight. His tongue was aching now, gums dry, making it difficult to articulate. All he had was a worn-out piece off a crumbly vow: "We promised each other to stay out of this."

"I'm not joining the Anarchs," Lily snapped. "I just understand what they're about."

"The hell you're not. You run with them, you dress like them—Christ, Lil—you even fucking _talk_ like them."

"I LIKE them. Do you ever get fed up with this?" He hadn't expected it—for her to U-turn like that, going on the offensive, and E couldn't catch up. "I mean, it's a little fucking ridiculous, don't you think? You pulled a short stick; so what? It's time to get out of your corner and face the rest of the world. We have to protect what we have. And you're not going to make it if you can't help defend the couple of basic rules that work for people like us."

"Lily, can you get off the soapbox for a second? Can you hear yourself?"

"Come _on_ , E. You're not even giving this a chance." The hostility softened, became something else. Lily's voice fell into a whine. Her arms linked around one of his, unexpectedly sweet, a cradle of awkward limb. His head hurt. Whatever was left of his guts were sticking painfully to his bones. "I wish you'd come with me sometime. You don't have to talk to anybody. But I want you to meet them. They're good people. Really they are. Nines invited me to bring you. Just come shake a few hands and see what you think, OK? Just listen to him talk and you'll see why I—"

E wrestled his forearm from her—more viciousness than he intended, or maybe not. Maybe it was exactly what he intended; his joints felt gummy; he couldn't taste the metallic bite of adrenaline in his mouth. "You're not listening to me, Lil. I don't want to go there. What the hell kind of consolation do you expect me to get? What the hell do you think those people have to tell us about what we are that I don't already—"

Her hair was a too-natural red in the unsatisfactory light. Her body was slack and grasping when it turned to face him fully, and the fingers tensed as though they were holding something very tightly, but there was nothing there in the cups of Lily's palms. "E, you have to tell me, honestly," she demanded, but it was a sad _honestly_. The Fight—their fight—was beginning to hurt in a way that just made you feel like your hands had been cut off. It was a familiar, floundering, deadweight despair. "Can you live like this? Can you do this forever? Don't you want..."

"Want what?" He had to hear it.

"I don't know. I don't." That look. That's the one that really made him ill. Take a match to the back of a brain and what color does a woman burn? Nothing in those two twitches of her hands. She had nothing to fill up her blank spot. "I just wanted more."

"More WHAT?"

"More than this," was all. "I don't know. I know I don't want to live like this. Something has to be better, E. There has to be some way to do better than we were. People, maybe. Real people."

"You have people. You've got Rosie, Jules, and Ms. Woeburne."

"Ms. Woeburne is my boss, E!" The empty parts of Lily's eyes were open again, frantic whites and thick pupils, palms airborne. "I do a job for her. I clean her floors. She is not on our side. And she is _not_ my people. And Rosa—Rosa isn't even coherent half the time! Last week she babbled for thirty minutes straight about this 'Lone Wolf' character and some dude on a fucking couch! I don't see why you're all of a sudden losing your shit about this. Like this is something new, like I don't talk about it, like I haven't begged you to hear it. They don't even care about me being thin. Do you know what that's like? I get treated more like a human being over there than I do mopping anybody's fucking cabinets. Who the fuck do they think they are?" _Splinters_. "We didn't choose this. In fact, from what I've been told, it's probably Rolf's fault—not mine. Nines says—"

"Has it occurred to you that I don't give a flying fuck what Nines says?"

He'd planned on swiveling away and storming into their kitchen, righteous, teeth bared, very dramatic, but the audacious squawk of sound stopped him. Lily didn't move. She was standing behind the sofa, verbally slapped, the pacifism wiped off her face, all those splinters in a jigsaw at her feet.

"Oh my God," she spat. Her top lip curled. "Are you kidding me? Are you fucking kidding me, E? _That's_ what you think? _That's_ what this is about?"

"No, it's not. It's that—look. I don't know what this is about, Lily," he groaned—gave it up, just like that—terribly tired, awfully hurt. E faced floorwards again, raking through dishwater hair, hooking each finger irately behind his head because there was nowhere better to put them. He tried to breathe out. His jaw flexed and released and bit. He knew she was looking; he couldn't look back. "I'm not pretending to know anything. I don't act like I understand things I don't. But I do know you are off your face with this Anarch shit. And I see what it's—"

"It's not shit. It's why I'm still around to—"

"It's obviously putting a huge slant on how you—"

"I'm talking to you about injustice and you're doing the _jealous_ _boyfriend_ thing? Do you have any idea how—completely pathetic? Can you even remotely appreciate what a fucked-up—"

"Can you let me finish my sentences, please?" E had to scrub at the pores of his forehead, the hollows in his cheeks, the tickle of bridge on his nose. She looked like she wanted to hurl something. She let him. "I'm trying to tell you that _yes_. I am afraid. I'm afraid of vampires, I'm afraid what's going to happen on any given night, and I am afraid _for_ you—that you're making a mistake. You keep telling me to stop being afraid, but I love you. How the hell do you expect me to go about that? If I love you, I have to be afraid for you. I have to worry something is going to happen."

Lily had grumbled out an automatic "I love you, too," but three words—insisted too often or not often enough—can't promise you freedom. They can't make you stronger on their own, or fix your problems, no matter how soberly you wish they could. She stood on the other side of their den, past that folded-up futon where a Ventrue had slept, swallowing. There was a moth dying on the stucco. Her feet were rooted in place shoulder-width apart, and there was nothing to suggest her knees would, or had ever, crumpled in.

"You want me to stop becoming what I am because it's making you scared," she translated; it was a dumbed-down reading. But even if it wasn't the whole spirit of the truth, it wasn't all a lie. "But you think I'm going to turn back when I finally feel like I'm getting control of myself, of my life. You think I'm just going to change who I am because you're afraid. And you're wrong. I'm telling you: you're wrong."

"I don't want you to change! There is nothing wrong with you. You don't need to change. But you are. You're becoming someone I don't think you really know. I don't think you know what you're—"

"Oh, and I guess you do, so looks like problem-solved. Glad we cleared that up. Tell me something. What if _this_ _is_ me?" Lily dared him, her teeth clean in the shaded lamplight. Saliva was gathering and sparkling around her largest ones. She seemed bigger than she was. "What would that mean for you? I was a kid when this happened. We were kids. You, too. But especially me. I didn't know who the fuck I was. Did you? Maybe I'm starting to figure that out for myself. Maybe I've always been this. Maybe I was never a limp fucking wallflower, somebody's princess, just lying in the sand. That's who you said I was. Nobody asked me. Nobody gave me a chance to know who I want to be."

"You are my girlfriend. You are the person I want to live with. You are my Sire. That's what I know. That's why I—"

" _I_ don't have a Sire. _I_ don't have anyone to tell me what I need to do. And now I finally find somebody who knows how this all works, who gives me half the time of day, and this is what you sit here and think about? You know what," she decided. For herself—and for him—clapping her hands together and clenching them tight. The tips bleached, and pockets of red twisted through the palms where they strangled one another. It looked like a child's hands at prayer. "I don't buy it. I don't buy this from you. I think you are hacked off I'm getting better at it. At being what we are. I think you miss having somebody clinging to your ankles. Some kid who can't do anything for herself because she's scared shitless all the time."

"That is not what I think," E told her; the apple in his throat was wobbling and he felt like an orange somebody had squeezed.

"Maybe you think that I won't need you to take care of me anymore. That would be the end of the world. Maybe you think that, if I got it in my head to, I might actually survive on my own. That I'm not completely dependent on you. Wouldn't that be the worst? If you thought I could stand a chance at finishing something I—"

E couldn't say what the sound that came out of him was. It wasn't a scream, or a huff, or a bark. He could only tell you what it was made of: exasperation, dropped cards, the scrape of anchor tied beneath the stomach. "What the fuck are you talking about? I think you are dealing with some old, buried shit and you're pushing it off on me. I think _you_ think you found a new Sire, and you're heading up the creek without a paddle because somebody else's Baron says you can handle it. But what happens when you're down there, and suddenly you find out you're in over your head? Tell me what's not going to happen. Tell me where that leaves me."

Lily stared at him from across the cramped living room. Time passed where nobody spoke. It had begun to seem that they might never do it again.

"OK," she finally said.

E could never remember hearing something so raw in Lily's voice. He felt like somebody poured concrete down his nose, his throat. He did know: she had bought and loaded and fed that gun.

"OK. I am done. I am done trying to explain things to you, or convince you, or teach you what I've learned. You win. Everything I've talked to you about, and you didn't hear a thing. Because _this_ is what you sit here and think about. Seriously? You think what you want," she told him.

E watched as, moving with hurried precision, Lily pulled her purse open, tucking back the very same belongings she'd only just removed. She did not meet his eyes again. _Where was the gun,_ he thought, immediately, like instinct. _Where is the—?_

"Where the hell do you think you're going?" E demanded, stumbling around their cumbersome old coffee table after her. She'd swung a closet door, shoving through stray sleeves for a summer jacket. Her lower lip had disappeared into her mouth; you could only see the indentations of the canines. There was a chill from the kitchen fan. She didn't humor him. Not even a sniff—not even a sob—not even a double-take as he chased Lily halfway out into their building's poorly-lit hall, hands less full than hers.

"Same place," she told him, "as always. I'm not saying anything else to you. You can come with me, or you won't."

"That's your ultimatum? Real fucking mature, Lily. That's how you handle this? Let me give you one: you walk out of this conversation, and you better not expect me to welcome you back. You better not expect me. Answer me! The sun'll be up. What are you—? Where are you—?"

"Up the fucking river," she shouted, and slammed the stairway door shut in E's face.

 _Going_.

The bang rattled all of his ribs. Lily had gone, and he was in this room of theirs alone—just like he had been—sit, worry, wait. E flopped wearily into a threadbare lounge chair. He tried to catch his breath before realizing there was nothing to catch. He sat.

Her feet creaked on each stair. Old wood, all the way down. Then the hinges opening, then the front door closed, the street hissed in; she left.

The laptop was still on. She hadn't bothered taking it. He didn't think he could touch it again. A lump, like a grenade, lodged painfully in his gullet; he tried to swallow; his forehead, throbbing, landed in his palm heels. Shell-shocked, E looked around.

Across the apartment—tacked on their kitchen wall—was a telephone. Above it, a whiteboard of numbers. You could almost read them from here.

 _Ms. Woeburne_ was the third bullet down.


	43. Lost Lenore

The following night, four minutes after she'd trotted out Empire Hotel's lobby, Ms. Woeburne's mobile rang.

"Woeburne." It was pinned between her coat shoulder and her ear lobe as car keys jostled home. "I'm sorry, who? Eugene who? I don't know any—Oh. Yes. Right." Mild surprise registered on the Ventrue face. She puffed away a stray fork of hair, tossed her portfolio bag into the passenger seat, and swung a blue slingback after it. "What do you need? Lily is here. Upstairs. I'm just leaving, but you are welcome to… Come again? I didn't catch that. What do you—?"

And she sat in that dim parking lot, fingers tight around the wheel leather, as Lily upstairs came apart.

Ms. Woeburne idled. E's explanation fumbled around; it was a pussyfoot mess, punctuated by the mechanical engine _'clink'_ of the Foreman's car. Her body did not move. Her lips, plum and serious, began to purse, just slightly, at their edges.

"I see," Ms. Woeburne finally said. "No, I had no idea. Thank you for telling me. Yes, you did the right thing. Quite. I'll take care of it. Goodbye."

She turned off the phone, recalibrated for another moment, and walked quietly back to her apartment.

You may be concerned here. You may think that Ms. Woeburne might do something she will regret.

But the surprise of it, you know. The It Couldn't Be.

Reserve instead; congealing, cold blockages, mud rolling down the lines to the heart. It is a numb-mouthed sensation—the sort that leaves you stuck to the seat of a doctor's table, or holding your face in your hands, or stumbling out into a snowy city street. It should be a once-in-a-lifetime thing.

So it was under that strange half-in, half-out body state that Ms. Woeburne found her latched front door. She inserted the key, took the brass handle, and opened it with the smallest turn of a wrist.

And there they were: the vampire, standing, mood blizzarding, face mild, documentarial numbness, dispassionately watching the girl's fingers rifle through a file cabinet, spotting the Phillips-head and hinge screws glinting on the carpet.

Ms. Woeburne didn't say a thing. She recognized the reality of having been an idiot. Mud, or maybe antifreeze, straight to the nave of her chest.

Unaware she was no longer alone, Lily worked. She flipped through several folders before choosing one. She found something. She creased the chunk into an acceptable size for her jean pocket, and she patted it there, and then that watered milk girl—dapple-cheeked, apple-pie, oblivious—turned around.

The condor is standing in the doorway.

The talons are upon you; what do you do?

Snakes, if you have met one, rear before they bite. They peel their gums away and bare the hollow teeth, and they stand on their bellies to glare you down. Who can say why they do this—Intimidation sounds plausible, but it feels somehow feels incomplete. Far more likely, Ms. Woeburne thinks, is an old, skin-deep revulsion, an itch that makes an animal pull back from evil smells, a human cover her mouth on the lip of disaster. It makes the Ventrue hover motionless outside her household in that precipitate moment of seeing clearly; it makes the sneer form across her face; and the awareness of poison tightens every notch down her back. When a venomous snake happens, she happens with force.

It's intentional; it has to be. A snakebite follows an invasion and is an act of war.

Ms. Woeburne's knuckles against her face had ricochet. Like a nailgun. Not so much like teeth.

"You," she said.

The momentum of her backhand connected to cheekbone with a slingshot _pow_. It sent Lily straight to the gray rug, right sneaker catching one edge of coffee table and upending a magazine stack. _Wall Street Journal_ exploded into the air.

The girl grabbed her face and thought she was going to die.

 _How dare you,_ the Ventrue shouted above her, a thousand miles away. Everything was spinning and Lily couldn't get her mind to stop. Maybe she let out a wail; maybe she begged _pleasepleasegodplease, don't kill me_ ; maybe she just curled up there, waiting for the cowboy boot in her spine.

"Shut up. I ought to kill you right where you fell. Traitor. Miserable bitch! Do you have any idea—"

The vampire was panting needlessly. Lily couldn't hear right; there was blood welling in the cup of her ear where Ms. Woeburne had hit it. Palms and feet scrambled backwards uselessly. Ancient hates: ancestral resentment for smaller or bigger peoples. It isn't always the full story. It isn't always undeserved.

There was nowhere you could hide in this terribly clean house.

Not ten minutes ago, had left through this same door. She'd been bored instructions, a work satchel, a sedate _evening_. She could not be bothered to look back up or wave goodbye. She did not look capable of getting angry at all.

"—any idea? Any IDEA with whom you are fucking? Who are you to do this to me? I should shoot you for this. I ought to break your neck," Woeburne foamed, lips pared over sharp teeth. She was screaming at the top of her lungs. "Pick your carcass off my floor!"

What do you do when you're a fish and the talons are black with your blood? If you can, you make yourself tiny. Lily twisted around to hands-and-knees, scrambling towards the empty dining hall. Before she could pull herself up that daunting red table, trying to stand, the Foreman intercepted with a second fistful of neatly-squared fingernails. They sank like a bird's foot, ripping crimson across the neonate's swelling nose—four of them, one for each finger, loosed surface blood into the air. Lanky forearms broke the coming fall. Woeburne's blow was deceptively powerful; it propelled her sideways and into the kitchen, a fearfully orderly and undisturbed room, where Lily's head glanced off a counter corner. Bar enamel blackened the Caitiff's left eye. She caught herself woozily by a drawer handle, vision spinning. Its moorings gave way. Everything was lemon-fresh, newly cleaned; silverware avalanched across the floor.

"What waste of my charity; you stupid child! I should have known better. I should have known better than to take in a stray," she spat, shoulders hunched in the doorway. Ventrue fangs are fierce, tusky white; the insides of Ms. Woeburne's eyes flared, blotting the color around, like pouring crude oil over a china bowl. She looked like nothing Lily had ever seen: avian, lucid and beyond frightening. "How dare you" again. "I gave you a chance. I took you into my home. This is how you repay me? Thankless little bitch! Why would you? Why would you do this?"

Lily, palms looking for traction on the linoleum she'd waxed a week ago, could not retch up a satisfying answer, and could not manage the lie. There was no neat and tidy reason like that. There wasn't a plot. It would have been easier if there was.

She tried to still the teeter-totter of consciousness. Scattered forks and serving spoons bit into her knees. One set of prongs punctured the Capris and bit thigh flesh, forming three scarlet dots through denim blue. Tears trickled around Lily's nostrils, joining a general icy burn from the clawmarks. She was mortified. By Ms. Woeburne's transformation, from composed officer to hissing death threat, and by the knowing that this viciousness was not biological injustice, but something between them. Something that had been done.

So many vampires have threatened Lily before. But never like this. She'd never seen righteousness in the face of somebody about to kill.

Last night she would have told him no.

 

* * *

 

" _Need to talk to you," was all he said, nodding her upstairs. He did not take off his coat or his guns. He was not two steps past The Last Round's door._

_Lily had been slumped against the booth she slept in yesterday when Nines walked in, her back hurting, her eyes puffed-pink, looking at nothing. There was a movie playing on a rickety bar television; she couldn't tell what it was. Her mind was full of static. Her stomach wouldn't stand for rehashing what E said and what she said-back. There wasn't much she felt like talking about at all. Not to Rodriguez—and not even to his Den Mother, who was currently sitting in the opposite bench, fighting with a nonresponsive remote control. She could not make the table feel solid beneath her hands._

_Damsel didn't speak, but she straightened when the Baron walked in—fixed her stature, toughened her jaw. Lily knew she could not quite protect her. There was a dread and that small-fish feeling stewing again. There was a knot in the woman's throat that wouldn't come undone._

'Please not me,' _she thought when he entered, when the door squeaked open and a familiar silhouette pushed in. Lily didn't think she could bear Nines Rodriguez right now._

" _Can't it wait?" Damsel snorted, gesturing belligerently at him with the remote. You accuse people like this of jealousy. But that wasn't it for Damsel—not at all. She fluffed up to make herself more visible, but not always like pride. Sometimes it was like maybe he'd notice her first, and leave you be. "We're in the middle of something. By the way, we got batteries lying around? Can't make anything in this run-down goddamn shack of shit to work worth a—"_

_Nines had nothing for her. He looked directly at Lily. It was not a request. "Right now."_

You.

_She wiped her face in her hands and gulped the knot and breathed out._

_"OK," Lily said. "I'll talk."_

 

* * *

 

Last night she would've told him no, but last night was a different world.

It had never seemed real. She'd sat at a Baron's table; she'd gone upstairs; she'd drank what they gave her and nodded her head when they talked; but becoming an Anarch had never seemed like a real option until the accusation was pitched in her face. God, Lily couldn't start wondering why. She couldn't start questioning if maybe she's always been a pawn du joir, valuable until her uses or her arteries went dry. She couldn't ask herself the things she's been burning to ask him: _why me? what do you see in me?_ because the answers only looked sad. Funny how one stupid fight about something else can crash the universe. One shitty quarrel; a capful of laundry detergent on a bloodstained shirt; somebody who says _sure, child, you do what you want_. Maybe she was wrong. Maybe she shouldn't have tried.

Lily never wanted to hurt E. She hadn't wanted to hurt Ms. Woeburne. But last night hurt everywhere, and now the only thing leftover for Lily to do was to not fail Nines.

" _It takes one night of courage, kid. One night, you do what you have to. And then you're free."_ The Brujah's promise was easy like a folk tale, or like a game. She had to do it.

Her bottom lip was split. Lily's tongue found blood, and maybe it was the taste doing this to her—weakening the legs, buckling the joints before she could find solid ground. Her knees and palm heels skittered across unused eating utensils. Ms. Woeburne's shoe toes gleaned angrily three feet away, a callous, synthetic blue. _'She's going to kill me,'_ dawned suddenly. Lily fumbled for something to defend herself, finding a steak knife.

"Touch it," Ms. Woeburne swore. "I will cut your throat."

She could hear the sincerity. Her fingers curled back. Stainless steel waited dispassionately on the floor.

"I am so sorry," Lily choked. There was a salt dribble down the bridge of her nose.

"Don't you dare." It was a rattlesnake warning. The thin-blood could see the entire bare surface of those teeth. They were the same size, the same shape, extraordinarily sharper than hers. "I ought to smash in your head. You stupid, stupid child! I should have you brained for this. I could kill you myself. And if I were the person who—"

Lily started sobbing, which seemed to distract the Ventrue, twisting her temper into loops. Impatience hardened the green in her eyes. Her fists forced themselves to unclench; her nailtips were ragged on fledgling cheek and blood. She bristled the _I shoulds, I coulds_ out.

"If I were him, if I wanted, I'd end you. I'd have your head. But I'm not. I don't. Apparently. I don't want it. Get up—get off my floor," she barked. One zipped heel kicked a small burst of silverware. A butter knife flat bounced off the thin-blood's jaw. She didn't know who he was. "Belly-crawl back to your Anarchs. Die with them when they rip themselves apart. I don't want to hear it. I never want to see your face again."

Lily stood. The effort hurt, and her limbs were stony, omega-like, unwilling to believe they could survive this. She limped across the kitchen on her twisted ankle. To pass the Ventrue by that arch was a fearful, terrible thing. But she did, and the prints of her shoe soles left their marks on distressed carpet, one after the other, shoving sidewinder curves into the shag as Ms. Woeburne's glare never left her back. Clear, furious eyes followed outside into the hallway, where Lily was exiled to the chintz and mahogany world outside.

"If I see you. I'll shoot," she swore, slammed the door, latched the lock, and stormed back into her apartment to pick up the spilled spoons.

"Horrible, horrible girl," Ms. Woeburne scolded no one. Her neat shoes were livid against the white kitchen linoleum, where she kneeled carefully on her white pencil skirt, dumping handfuls of stainless steel into the dismantled white drawer.

_'Awful, evil, whimpering little girl. Everything I've done. Well, I won't waste my time. Far be it from me. I won't waste the time. Why would anyone—? Why do I keep all this junk?'_

The Foreman grabbed rackfuls of cutlery, outraged and somehow thankful for them—for the distraction of these tea spoons, dinner forks, bread knives. They kept it at arm's length. The sight of those files in Lily's hands blinked, at the periphery of her eyeballs, in the back of her mind. And from the knowledge of having been taken for fool. It hurt. Badly.

' _Wasted time. It's just as well. It's what I get. Anyway, there you are. Let her work for the wolves, if it's what she wants; she deserves whatever she gets. I wash my hands. She was a mistake.'_

Ms. Woeburne manhandled her drawer back into its slot, and then she _did_ wash her hands—rinsed off Lily's blood, patted her nailbeds dry, then sat stiffly at the idle computer. There were still things that needed doing. There were things that needed doing now, certainly, things that hadn't needed to be done an hour ago. She'd have to replace the damage. She'd have to find someone new.

In that endeavor, S.W. had been typing Joelle a brief, unexplained request for a personnel list when up came something different.

Her flash drive—which normally winked a lazy, miscellaneous yellow—was gone.

Ms. Woeburne is not entirely a callous bitch. She didn't want Lily dead. Or, at least, she didn't want to kill her, which is not the same thing. She does not believe in passionate revenge or coddling one's Beast. She can disengage. But more than anything else at present, or ever: this un-callous, un-passionate, un-kind Camarilla corporal does not want give a bigger Ventrue cause to chop her heard off her neck.

Calling Mr. LaCroix for help, she has learned, is a decidedly bad idea.

Not for Lily's sake, who'd most certainly be gunned into a dust heap. (She deserves it, S.W. said, and whatever else comes.) But Ms. Woeburne does not deserve it. And Ms. Woeburne had an oppressive hunch that Mr. LaCroix won't stop at a slap across his corporal's palm. Not in the United States; not if her charity-case let confidential information hit Nosferatu markets. Ms. Woeburne has always know that the moment her presence becomes a liability, Prince LA will dispatch her. And he will do it confidently, unrepentantly, swifter than blinking, and faster than a Foreman can wash her hands.

The logical response to this logical fear would be to tear after Lily Harris and strip the skin off her bones until she found what was taken. But S.W. didn't have the time. She barely had enough leeway to panic, it turned out, before things took a turn, the chain of events completed, and a message lit up.

* * *

 

 **TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: [NO NAME]**  
**DATE: AUGUST 4 2010 9:30 PM**  
**SUBJECT: [NONE]**

 

310 502 9488. 24 hours.

 

* * *

 

_Shit._

Feeling very much like a dead body, Ms. Woeburne picked up her cellular phone, and she dialed.

There's no use in waiting, the Ventrue said to herself. Two tolls. On the third, an answer came: _yes_ in a dense, boxy bass, and it was hardnosed, and it expected her, though not entirely so soon.

"This is Ms. Woeburne," she said—that was all.

 _"Stay on the line,"_ the voice commanded. You could hear traffic rumbling through the backdrops. She almost recognized it, modern and economical, but couldn't stitch on a face. Not that the touchableness of a face mattered. Ms. Woeburne already knew who arranged this quaint mid-quarter blackmail, and figured that—Kuei-jin or witch-hunters notwithstanding—her situation probably couldn't get a whole hell of a lot worse.

 _Shit, shit, shit._ Her sobriety was too thick to blubber for help.

' _Miserable bitch. I should have. I should've torn out her jugular and wrapped it around her throat.'_ Ms. Woeburne was seething. She could feel the slow, sludge burn of wanting to kill; but with that fury came something else. Her molars tightened until they hurt the rest of her mouth. If Sebastian found out, it would secure S.W. a comfy mantle-place urn, and why else would they have her do this? Get your enemy to implicate herself. _'Spying for Anarchs. Side-splitting notion. Blood thinner than milk and that stupid girl expects she has any business? I should have killed her! I should have killed her the moment I walked in.'_

Lips pressed into a bull's-eye, Ms. Woeburne listened for exactly six more minutes. When the instructions came, they were not diplomatic.

 _"I'm not going to repeat this,"_ the faceless voice boomed, hamfistedly scary. Its suddenness startled her but briefly. It was an inevitable bump in her stomach. _"I've got intelligence in my hands that could smear you. There's not a lot more that would make my day. So it's in your best interests to hear this out. Do you understand?"_ She said nothing. Ms. Woeburne's brand of rigidness was made of plainclothes, uncomplicated anger. The lack of reaction might have stirred a little insecurity in that burly, dramatic voice. _"I'm going to lay things out so they're very simple,"_ he pressed on. _"It's up to you how we're going to handle this. Do you understand me?"_ again. _"Do you understand your situation?"_

The Foreman clenched, exhaled, and chewed the insides of her cheeks. Showing fear to a Brujah is like plunging into piranhas with a hole in your skin.

S. Woeburne did not, this time, bite through her tongue.

"I understand. Perfectly well," the Ventrue said, her English like the clack of ice in a cola class. "So I would hope—before you sent your fink to break into my home—you understand who it is you're dealing with."

There was another pause. _"We know who you are, bitch,"_ the voice remarked, seeming insulted. _"Pay attention to me. I've got a full record of—"_

"If you're going to blackmail someone over the telephone, at least spare her this stupidness. I haven't got all night to listen to you." The bullhead of adrenaline was making her mouth off. It seemed to know what it was doing, though, so she buckled down and held on. "Soldier to soldier, let me pass on a bit of advice. Why don't you save us both the embarrassment and turn this over to your boss. I'll be waiting."

" _You have no idea what you're about to—"_

"I am about to hang up the telephone. Do as I say. Or don't."

There was a shuffling and an exchange of words. Ms. Woeburne listened hard as a hare. Maybe a minute passed.

 _"Just for the record,"_ Nines Rodriguez said. _"_ You _called_ me _."_

She knew who was threatening her; you could have, too, if you were trained to do so. This did not mean she could extinguish the immediate, organic reaction: there was a pepper of old pain through her fingers, a buck of the hands. She compressed them into fists, swallowed a split-second catch in her throat. Ms. Woeburne spoke lowly, so it would not sound like she was upset, or that she'd ever been upset.

"Don't be clever. I was clear with your henchman. What do you want?" S.W.'s mouth was dry like a rock beach at noon. She couldn't go tongue-tied on this. Her ego was blueblooded and dispassionate, even when she was not. _'Don't overshare. They'll think you can be scared into something. Mock them.'_

 _"Information. I don't see you as being in a real great position to argue about it."_ In the backdrops: a small mechanical whirl. A mouse scroll. Indignity flared in her, brash and flammable; she stomped it out. There's no use getting hysterical over what you already know. _"Unfortunate stuff to leave lying around, Woeburne. 'Human Iconolatry in Pre-Colonial Ghana.' You write this?"_

Ms. Woeburne sneered nastily through her front teeth. "I'm a plagiarist. My report card is toast. Is that all you—"

 _"Nope, you didn't write it. Says so right here: 'Anna Scott, Stanford University.' That's a real cute name. Sure I'd recognize a name that cute if I heard it before. Maybe from a ghoul we got on First Street in Trespass and Larceny."_ There it was. Woeburne swore, viciously, over such a trifling thing to get blackmailed about. She pushed her palm into her collarbone because it felt like it was keeping her from something, somehow.

"Maybe," she conceded. "Or maybe you have no idea what in the hell you are talking about, or who you're about to engage. I thought we dealt with you people the last time. But here you are, coming back for more." She didn't stop long enough for him to interrupt her. "Does a Blood Hunt mean anything to you? Do you imagine this is something we will let you plea bargain away?"

" _Are you finished?"_

"You'll be."

He cut: _"Since we're talking about plea bargains. I wonder your Prince would say if he knew you let a thin-blood wreck his Hollywood deal. And I_ _wonder what Isaac would think about LaCroix's file clerk fucking around with his ghouls. I pity the guy who makes this phone call. Course, if you'd rather it stayed between you and me, I'm fine with that. Nobody else has to know about Anna Scott."_

Ms. Woeburne suffocated for a half-second _._ For discipline—for restraint, and for penalty—she bit down hard on her bottom lip.

 _"Hello,"_ Nines asked.

"Don't waste my time. I'm listening." Where another woman might've paced, this one stood martial-straight in the center of her upturned living room. The empty glass of her stare was stoic and unblinking. Her fingernails, stubbornly maroon, pulled off and replaced the frames on her nose.

_"Don't scare yourself. This is an easy one._ _I just need your help with a little housecleaning."_

"Don't you have Lily for that?" The Baron's chuckle was brutal.

_"You're all right, London. You're doing OK."_

"I'll be sure that goes in my file."

_"Here I thought you'd hold a—"_

"What in the hell do you want?"

She had no patience for it. Rodriguez went on: _"We'll be brief, Woeburne. I got a feeling you're as sick of the name de Luca as I am. But what about these names?: Andi Michaels and Lawrence Figueroa. Those are the two kids he murdered in Long Beach."_ A little certainty cooled the Baron's loathsome, affable burr. _"They were also the Childer of a pretty good friend of mine. I couldn't prove if LaCroix licensed that hit or not. Frankly, I'm past caring. Gave it up. Old news. What I still care about is how a no-count shitheel like Victor de Luca got their names in his book in the first place. You and me don't have the best history on that topic, I'm aware. But put that on the back-burner for a minute because here is my proposition to you."_ And it was: " _I've been in this game long enough to know when to bury a hatchet, and if there's a rat in my den. I got a shovel and I got a rat. So I thought about you. And I'd appreciate it, Ms. Woeburne, if you'd figure out who that rat is."_

"Would you. You can tell me, then, how do you expect I will be able to do that," she required, stomach tight in preparation for a knife, one arm crossing defensively over her hips. "This whole case predates me. I was not an active agent. And it's locked now. So if your leverage against me is the ceasefire, you're picking your pros and cons very poorly. No one is going to unlock it; no smart officer; least of all me," she told him. "It's not an issue of just walking into a place and pulling a file. It involves clearance privileges that I do not—"

" _I understand. But—"_

"No. Take it from me. You _really_ don't."

There was a heavy pause in which she thought maybe the Party had thrown up their hands and hung up.

 _"Here's the thing, though,"_ the Anarch observed, and she let go of that hope, as much of a pathetic, skinny hope that it was. _"I don't particular care what you have to do. I know you're in a position to get me the evidence I need. You have three days. Then we meet at a secure location I decide on. Clear enough?"_ He gave her a menacing intermission. She bristled. _"Do you want to take notes."_

Ms. Woeburne wanted to say something smart, but her throat was too thick and sour. The palms, hidden safely by the clench of her fingers, throbbed. "Is this a joke?"

_"Do you hear me laughing?"_

"No, but there's no way you're being serious with me. Because what you're asking isn't possible. I'm not turning myself in to the Anarch Party with a bow on my neck. If you're going to do this—if you're going to gamble on my cooperation—do it the right way. Suggest a drop, and I'll make it. I will. But anything else is out of the question. Isn't _possible._ "

 _"Ventrue."_ Rodriguez's voice sank. There's a keenness that comes with being a bully that threatens more than words can. Nothing would be worse for her than slamming down the telephone, and Ms. Woeburne—who was alive, and intact, and yes, OK—held on to it with terrible force of will. _"I've got some bad news for you. If I wanted you dead—at any time, for any reason—I'd just have Skelter, here, drive across town and put an incendiary down you. I'd light you up like a fucking firecracker. We would not be talking. But we are. So this is the way it's going to go. You're going to man up, make the appointment, and deliver what I ask, or you are in for a_ world _of things you won't like. That's my offer, and it's final."_

Pause—brief and disorienting. Her canines were punishing the soft flesh of her cheek. She expected to taste blood, but it never came.

 _"Three days,"_ he repeated. She stood still. _"Sleep well, senator."_

_Click._

And Ms. Woeburne was deserted in her apartment—dead phone in one hand, red drops on the floor, computer waiting, an empty blue.


	44. Standing Still

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: RODERICK DUNN**  
**DATE: JULY 20 2010 10:04 PM**  
**SUBJECT: ARE YOU STILL THERE?**

 

Hello, hello—

We’re officially post-Security Conference and the lion’s share of us are still alive to tell the tale, all bets to the contrary. Thought I’d drop you a line and let you know the latest. House continues to stand. As per your explicit directive. Which I’m left to figure is at least decent evidence for you and Mr. LaCroix that I am marginally good for something.

Well, I’m all right.

Haven’t heard from you in a bit and am appropriately, albeit remotely, concerned. If the expenditure reports have become too burdensome, I wish you would let me know. I can easily tell Ms. Maldano to condense and stagger them. Or tell her not to send them, at all. Obviously, we’d all feel more comfortable with you having looked over them than without, but I understand if that’s a strain on your LA attentions. It’s a touch out-of-character not to hear from you in a month. Hope nothing untoward happened.

No harassments from Iva Charlotte since mid-June. R. Franklin poked about the street a bit, but I took care of it. Always something with the Harpies. Maybe it’s better that way; wouldn’t it be too suspicious if they suddenly clammed up and left us alone? I am endeavoring to prefer having them grousing in front of me than snooping through our garbage. Not doing too badly in that regard, I hope.

Will update you shortly re: security developments. Shauna may or may not have already sent on her notes from the conference, but says she hasn’t heard back from you, either.

Not on holiday, are you? (Ha ha ha.)

Jokes aside, please contact. Much thanks in advance. Bit worrisome. Talk soon.

Best wishes,

 

RODERICK DUNN  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
HENDON ESTATES

 

* * *

 

 

**TO: RODERICK DUNN**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE: JULY 20 2010 4:15 AM**  
**SUBJECT: RE: ARE YOU STILL THERE?**

 

Roderick:

I have labored to make it brutally clear to you that I do - not - have - time - for incompetence from Hendon. Or for you.

FINAL: I have nothing for you. I am not your teacher and you are not my responsibility. Fail or not. It is your job, not mine. It is your life, not mine.

Do not bother me about your things again.

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES

 

* * *

 

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: RODERICK DUNN**  
**DATE: JULY 21 2010 7:06 PM**  
**SUBJECT: RE: RE: ARE YOU STILL THERE?**

 

Dear Ms. Woeburne,

Misunderstanding. I apologize.

It won’t happen again.

Regretfully,

 

RODERICK DUNN  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
HENDON ESTATES


	45. The Hatchet

A revelation occurred to Ms. Woeburne over the course of her spoiled weekend: three days really isn't a lot of time.

It had seemed like decent wiggle-room at first. Seventy-two hours. It was an awful lot of time to take on something for Mr. LaCroix. It was a lot for Camarilla soldiers, that is—who never laze on off-days, don't waste gasoline, and fritter no free minutes away. _'I might just head this off with an evening to spare,'_ she thought, nodding to herself, because it wasn't ridiculous to think so, and because it made her feel good. _'Well, fine. It's fine. Good riddance.'_

The whole arrangement was frightening, of course, but Ms. Woburne didn't brood on it overmuch, because brooding always made her wrists cold, and then the tremors would start. This thing was manageable. It was fair trade. It was sacrificing one unscrupulous informer to preserve her title (selfish) and a ceasefire (for the common good). You know, she doubted preserving something qualified as genuine crime.

They are a little bit confidence, a corporal is, and a little bit denial.

The first problem, obviously, is her being a clumsy match for this amateur, ham-handed blackmail. Since S.W. wasn't a local, she had no legs to stand upon. None. Worse, when she finally started to poke about for anything that looked like a rat, Ms. Woeburne couldn't find one. She couldn't puzzle out why some other clerk had, apparently, taken considerable trouble to hide a Free-State mole's dossier from the junior staff. Joelle's agent listing was hardly elucidating; around the beat office, there were vague hints about a Gangrel informant, but if you looked it up, the name was blacked-out. Nothing in databases or telephone morgues. She was almost frustrated to the point of dropping her predicament on the floor and simply asking Mr. LaCroix. The Prince wouldn't be pleased, but if she was careful not to let out anything dangerous, he'd wouldn't nova. Probably. He probably wouldn't pitch a terrible fit over the broken cover of some Anarch spy.

Well, that, or he'd execute her because she'd been an incompetent, and you can't be a Prince and have an incompetent Childe.

_'Nope. That won't do. Not at all.'_

 

* * *

 

**TO: [NO NAME]**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE: AUGUST 5 2010 11:30 PM**  
**SUBJECT: REGARDING SUNDAY**

 

Be Advised:

I cannot close as scheduled. The investigation requires a security bypass; this is a delicate process and cannot be bull-rushed. I simply need more time.

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES

 

* * *

 

And the Party's reply?:

 

* * *

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: [NO NAME]**  
**DATE: AUGUST 5 2010 12:02 AM**  
**SUBJECT: RE: REGARDING SUNDAY**

 

Not our deal. Get it done, London.

 

* * *

 

Monday it was.

 _'What I wouldn't give for a few agents of my own. Central Los Angeles, and he gives me secretaries. I need firepower. I need someone with initiative.'_ S.W. blew a puff of air to hassle the bangs off her brow. She slumped. She glared at the computer clock. It was Thursday; it was half-past one in the AM.

_'Hell of a mess you're in, pup. How are you dodging this bullet?'_

She needed help. Fast.

Far as the Hendon expat knew, she herself carried more keycards to the LaCroix Foundation's private documents than any other Kindred in Los Angeles. She'd no real way of proving this hunch, of course, but couldn't imagine it wouldn't be true. And that said: while her clearance in this Domain was higher than most, even Ms. Woeburne couldn't exactly skip into Venture Tower and waltz out with sheaves of classified transcripts under one arm. Though she'd have almost enjoyed seeing Joelle try to stop her, the Ventrue would be markedly less thrilled to see Mr. LaCroix's Sheriff. What a buzz it'd make when the Prince's advocate went careening through his skyscraper window, head-first. _'Nope. Definitely not my first choice.'_

So the question: who could sell her the rat without ratting her out?

The Foreman chewed a loose ballpoint cap, mulling it over. This whole thing had devolved into a sinus headache, bluntly, but aches are not in the nature of Ventrue-Childer—and neither is hazarding the possibility she may have run out of options. It would take a few tweaks to her M.O., is all. It would demand the answer: which tender little leaf on LA's grapevine might have the strange desire to dangle their toes in both puddles? Camarilla and Free-State, all at once. Who could conceivably subsist so double-brained?

The name Voerman came to mind.

Ms. Woeburne had met the younger sister only once (at Therese Voerman's bi-annual networking forum, to which the pigtailed interloper had not even been invited, and who cleared out thirty minutes before her elder ever arrived). And she'd condescended to speak with her very briefly: "yes; hello; glad to meet you." Frank sexuality and faked stupidity offend our corporal. Still, she couldn't claim to prefer the senior sister; _prefer_ was too strong of a word. Santa Monica's former Baron was a stunted prospect, stitched together with self-interest and constant micromanagement. There were too many complaints coming from that district, piling up on S.W.'s desk. With Therese Voerman, "control freak" sounds like a compliment; business-class narcissism is too nice a term. She'd been a pendulum of a ruler: first an Anarch to keep Abrams and Rodriguez out of her territories; then an Independent when it made _Voerman Properties_ look like a good neighbor; and Therese was now, of course, peachy-keen to swing Camarilla when those territories were no longer the Party's to police. The loyalties of such a person mean nothing. She was an adder throwing dice among fatter, deadlier adders, but if she had a weak spot, it was in the turpentine smile of a sweet-sixteen face built just like hers.

It was well-known; it was in the black books of Venture Tower: _do not deal with the junior_. And yes, she was certainly distasteful—orange blossom perfume and the smack of rose lipgloss. But Ms. Woeburne would rather risk shooting herself in the foot in front of someone who cared nothing for politics beyond spoiling her sister's campaigns.

And, it need not be said, Jeanette Voerman had no relationship with Sebastian LaCroix.

Ms. Woeburne picked up her cell, hunted the number, and dialed. _'This is bound to at least be a lively waste of my time, if nothing else.'_

An unmistakable voice picked up.

 _"Hello, duckling,"_ it said, a sloppy greeting, a schoolgirl's bubbly purr. The Ventrue pursed unhappily. _"You've got The Asylum—lucky you. Jeanette Voerman, honeybee. Tell your hostess what's on the mind."_

Miles apart, you could hear the curve of her teeth; every 's' simpered, like rattlers in a wicker basket. Ms. Woeburne felt something hostile crackle up inside her, but had zero time for preferences. Her hand strangled the telephone.

"I'm not calling for the club. I've got a business offer for you, Ms. Voerman," the Foreman began, faking energy she didn't have. Her voice is Yorkshire, New York, whathaveyou. She wrinkled it up and she made it nice. "As a matter of fact, I think you might be able to help me. This is Ms. Woeburne with the LaCroix Foundation. We've met. Once. You remember me, I hope."

Jeanette tutted. _"Oh, kitten, don't be completely ridiculous. Of course I know you're His Highness's go-to-girl. How could anyone forget that cute walk and that tie."_ Woeburne's teeth gritted, and she tried a flat smile, afraid the anger would rush out of her throat. Being patronized by such a creature burned. _Cute walk_. Cute walk…? " _So, m'love,"_ the Voerman continued. A wink smacked through her shitty imitation slang _. "Whatever do you need from little old me?"_

"I wouldn't want to impose," the Foreman said, which is what someone imposing always says. It irked her, but this is the way of placating people, and Ms. Woeburne is quite all right at that. She has the credentials. Finally, the credentials. "Are you busy tomorrow? I have a few questions, and I'd prefer, if we could, to meet in-person. Nothing dangerous. They're harmless questions. Relatively speaking."

 _"Right now, nothing but Strawberry Fields would tickle me more. Meet me at the Surfside six minutes after midnight?"_ she asked; it was a joke rolled up in a 'yes.'

"That's the throwback diner on Washington Street?"

Voerman heaved a sing-song sigh. _"If you want to be boring about it. Won't wear my two-piece, then. Don't want to scandalize the nobility."_ A witch-cackle. The Nobility reminded herself it would only be one time and not for a very long while. _"Sad to say, cuppycake, but I better scamper off before Queen Victoria catches us running up her phone bill. It's a recession, and all. But I never dip on a friend in need. So I'll talk at your sweet face soon, Beckham. Ta,"_ she whistled, and blew a squeaky kiss, twisting the cable cord before clicking it down.

His Highness's Go-To-Girl flipped the cell onto the desk, leant back, and proceeded with her migraine. She felt like a crime drama hero from the bottom of the box.

Tongue lodged firmly in-cheek, S.W. cracked her neck, groaned, then resigned herself to an evening of lapdogs, schoolgirls, and bottomless offers in the black hours of night.

 

**II.**

 

Jeanette kept Ms. Woeburne biting her nails for one full hour before she slunk into the damn restaurant.

"Cheerio, kitty-cat!" Voerman peeped in as though there were nothing out of the ordinary about meeting at midnight. She was all chipper smiles and yellow split-ends. Neon green lingerie glared through her button-down, pale midriff bare as a newborn's unhardened skull. The Ventrue immediately felt hostile. True to their plans, though, she'd arrived alone, and in what apparently passed as incognito. There were pink canvass slippers on her feet and someone had done the favor of smearing red lipstick away from half of that evil-looking mouth.

"Hello," Ms. Woeburne said, because that's all she really had.

Jeanette swung a knitted shoulder-bag onto their greasy booth and plopped down across from the Foreman, her jeans made of out pleated denim, and her grin a spacey song. "Sorry I'm late. Practically had to sneak away from Mother Chastity. You know how that is. Nice jacket. Nice bone structure. Love the whole secret agent thing, bulletproof girl," she gave, something mean and happy sparkling in each eye, the blue and the jade. Ms. Woeburne was suddenly aware of her insides.

"I… suppose I should say thank you. Please. Have a seat. It's no trouble," the Foreman lied, reaching out to shake a hand. It was a bold, forcible, chin-out gesture. Ms. Woeburne imagined they were quite the nastily strange contrast, sitting there on circus-red diner benches: dark suit and a stripper fallen out of Catholic school. Here's hoping some patrolman didn't saunter in and try to collar the former for soliciting a prostitute. That would truly make this comedy of errors complete. "Thank you for meeting me on such short notice. It must have been an inconvenience, and I certainly appreciate it. LA's got me in a bit of a bind. Nothing to do with bullets—no need for bulletproof—but I sure hope you're not going to shoot at me."

Her outstretched palm was blinked-at. That violent red mouth parted like ripped satin.

"You are so adorable," Voerman cooed, snatching Woeburne's icy fingers and wagging them. S.W. battened down an urge to wallop the child upside her breathy hot air balloon of a head. "Of course I wouldn't leave you swinging out in the cold, peaches. I'm a philanthropist. So what can I do for you, exactly? Somehow I don't think you're interested in my advertised area of expertise."

She picked up a spoon and dropped it in her espresso mug. The black liquid clouded; it'd been sitting, and had already gone cold. "No, indeed not. This is a business call," the Ventrue insisted, watching for her companion's cherub face to fall. It did not. "But it is important business, nonetheless."

"Can't imagine what important business you'd have with me. Looking to break into the club scene, sweetie? I could maybe toss you a Frisbee down to San Diego. But if you're hinting for a formal recommendation, well…I hardly know you. It wouldn't be very professional of me to vouch for your managerial abilities when we've only just met, sunshine, would it?"

The suggestion such a thing could "recommend" one of Prince LA's own to anyone singed her. The added twinge that Jeanette might opt not to take the risk was worse. Ms. Woeburne had the teaspoon in her hand and, unawares, began to clink it on the rim of the demure white cup; it was made a distinct, bitter nerves sound. The girl was wearing rainbow rubber-bands over the beauty moles dotting her soft china forearms. The tarnished ladle tapped against the porcelain until dark coffee lines bled watery, feeble brown.

"What I need couldn't be discussed over a phone."

"Oh no?" Eager to play espionage, Jeanette pushed aside two untouched water glasses and spread both elbows boyishly across their table. "Then you just say-so to my sweet face, new friend."

"Before we get into it, I should warn you. It's a small favor—all I want is a name. But I'm afraid your sister might not approve of us speaking. I don't plan on using this information against either of you, of course; I don't plan on sharing it at all; but its release could be embarrassing to Therese. As an administrator. It involves a criminal in your territory. I'd wager the Camarilla would frown upon her failure to detain him. Do you understand what I'm saying, Ms. Voerman?" the Foreman wondered needlessly. She could see the wickedness spread from green iris to blue, a fast seepage behind the eyeballs, over the brain. They were opportunists in Santa Monica. S.W. pressed one palm against the varnished wood, manufacturing intrigue. She was very poised. She was still clicking the mug. "I hope this isn't too forward, but I really had nowhere else to turn."

"Buttercup," Jeanette announced, and her pretty hands clapped down on Ms. Woeburne's with flat, frank endorsement. "I got a feeling you and I are about to become besties."

They separated awkwardly as a waitress shimmied by, shooting both women a critical, disapproving look.

By the time she passed out of earshot, Ms. Woeburne had scrounged up a compliment. Sorely given, but not untrue: "I hear you know the West Coast better than just about anyone," the Ventrue said, studying her own clean, square fingernails. She cleared her throat, and bumped the spoon one final time. It lay neatly across a paper napkin to dry.

Jeanette saw the last of the stain turn to stickiness, pooling beneath the silverware, leaving a footprint. She brushed the bangs off her eyebrows and looked like a baby with a bright golden curl. "You hear well in Venture, shutter-bug. No debate there. And what are you going to do about it?"

"Here's my issue. I'm trying to locate a Gangrel Anarch of a certain disposition. Just for conversation. Being new to LA, and being who I am—as you'd imagine—has made finding him difficult."

"Well, you're going to have to give me a little more to go off of, jelly bean. Gangrel are a Free-State staple around here."

"Therein we have the problem." Ms. Woeburne adjusted all her compact bones back in the chair to sit up tall: short waist, tidy shoulders, tiny teeth, sharp elbows and a glint of glass over hawkish, warlike green. This is just how S.W. looks. It gives her a mechanical, threatening air. There is none of that slackness and sway you see from some vampires. Ms. Woeburne is deadbolts; she stands, sits, stares at you straight. "All I know about him is that he's probably associated in some way with their den in Long Beach. We suspect he's on the fence between our branch and Nines Rodriguez's people downtown. You can imagine that isn't pleasing us on either end of the field."

Voreman looked at Woeburne with slatted lashes. She popped a lavender bracelet over the bone of her wrist.

"I'm sorry; are you people playing a round of personnel tug-of-war with Nines Rodriguez? Sorry to tell you, kitty, since you've been such a bushel of berries, but I'm not jogging on that field," Jeanette told her, and S.W. felt her gut sinking as those razor-thin eyebrows perked. "I'm not stepping into the middle. I don't pick politicians and I wouldn't trust anyone's basket to carry my chicks—not a baby-faced Prince or the old Baron, bless his poor broke Brujah heart. It's not in my interests, and it's not on my list."

"What is?" Woeburne asked. Jeanette seemed to think it over. She sighed.

"All I want," breezed out, "is to be me, myself, and I. Black ties and Barons wash out with the tide in these parts. Prince LaCroix is lovely little sailor, sure, but he's a bore and a busybody, two things that are polar opposite my business. And Nines Rodriguez is not what they say. They never-ever are."

"I appreciate that, Ms. Voerman. I do. But I'm not asking for you to testify. All I want is a name."

Voerman traced bored loops around a flimsy cork coaster. She looked at the Ventrue for a minute—black coffee and black suit and blacker pupil, cemented in white—then heaved another dramatic sigh.

"I'm not going to tango on this floor," Jeanette announced. She picked up the Foreman's drying spoon and stuck it—dismal coffee taste—into one side of her mouth. You could hear the molars clack. You could see gloss on the handle when she pulled it out and let it hit the table. "But that said, I'm about to make your night. See—" (S.W. saw.) "Gangrel are a funny breed. The country mice and the city rats say they like to lick their wounds alone. But when I'm in town, and I usually am, it's hard for an Independent to resist a little TLC. That's my calling card, sweetie. And wait 'til you hear this: I went on a beachfront date roundabout one month ago with a nice ankle-biter run in from down south. There was still sand in his toes, cuddlebug. Now, I don't know how guilty his conscience was, but I do know he came panting in from—you guessed it, honeybee—Long Beach."

Shortly after the de Luca assassinations. "It has to be him," Ms. Woeburne decided. She stiffened up, rejuvenated, hope tingling her fingers. "I'll accept it, Ms. Voerman. I'll take your word. Now I need to take the name."

"Not so fast. We're going to be friends now—and that means tit-for-tat, snicklefritz. If I'm going to give you a secret, you give me one of yours."

"I suppose that's fair." Fair as fair gets when your meat is cold and your valves do not hitch like they once did. Frankly, she was three-fourths ready to hop headlong into bed with the hideous bracelets and grapefruit spritz if it meant that name; trading playground confessions was a far cry more tolerable. Hush-hush insults are simple stuff, and a foxish grin donned on S.W. when the perfect secret did: a harmless, offensive piece of hard candy for a vindictive sibling, one who liked to see her sister prickled and pale. "You might be interested in this. You know, I'm sure—I mean, it's been made clear—that Prince LaCroix will be interviewing your sister for a position on his cabinet. That's not likely to change, she'd be glad to know. But she might be less glad, I wager," the Ventrue wagered, digits lacing, "if she heard how he speaks of her privately."

"How does he speak?" The younger Voerman was eyeballing Ms. Woeburne with a poorly-veiled twinkle of pleasure.

"He can't stand her. Ms. Voerman, and I don't say that lightly. He's said—in my presence—she is a sycophant and a sniveler. His words. And the last time I was in a meeting with the two of them—which was, so you're aware, last week—Mr. LaCroix told me afterward that if she ever called him 'Sebastian' again, he'd have her pitched out the picture window."

Jeanette stared a few moments, grinned her made-up face into a crescent moon, and grabbed the Ventrue's left wrist. Bangles rattled against a small steel watch. Nails like cake sprinkles poked cool, unfriendly skin. "The man you're looking for is Naim Carroll," she whispered into Ms. Woeburne's keen ear, "and I think he's staying up near Bakersfield."

Naim Carroll.

"You," the good corporal said, and clasped her free hand atop their conspiratorial pile of fingers, "are an angel."

Voerman clucked her tongue, mismatched eyes rolling, waving away the flattery as casually as a debutante would. She swept her crocheted carrier off their tabletop. "Tell me something I don't know. But it's all icing, kitten-face. Don't get your undoubtedly cute panties in a bunch."

"No? No. But I am grateful." S.W.'s was a genuine sentiment, a nervous smile. "If you ever happen to need space downtown, don't hesitate. Place a call. My direct administrative power is limited in LA, but I can give you an inlet. I can arrange for a—"

But she wasn't able to finish topping the pot. Jeanette sabotaged Ms. Woeburne's goodbye handshake and pulled her into a hug, arms wrapping around board-stiff Camarilla shoulders. "Don't be silly, girlfriend! No need to start drafting IOUs. That's not my style." And it wasn't—because the shoreside sweetheart gave her one last quick, affectionate squeeze before cantering off, a gazelle in body, a lollipop personality. She smelled like Bombay blood mixed with grape soda. "Just let's you and me go shopping sometime."

Kindred are fantastical liars. They say this and they say that, and they cater and they toy, but a secret's never just a secret. And, frankly: Jyhad has never come so cheap.

 

**III.**

 

August seventh, S. Woeburne pulled into Confession's overbooked parking lot, powered-down the Audi, walked three blocks west, and forked into a horror movie alleyway where Nines Rodriguez was already waiting for her.

Bad night: back to the brick building behind him, hands fisted in his coat pockets, shoulders hunched forward like a terrible turn to a sunny afternoon. Antagonism radiated from the Brujah. Complete the checklist: dark hair; unsociable expression on an unshaven face; a vague switchblade air; and all this topped off by a typical sense of ill-repute. He nonchalantly did not notice her. Canned insouciance does not fool Camarilla pragmatism, though. No matter how ambivalent an ex-Baron might look, _she_ knew that _he_ knew she was there.

' _Stereotype,'_ the Ventrue thought, adjusted her blazer, and soldiered up for the unspeakable business of facing a people yours has beaten time and time and time again.

S.W. took a quick inventory of the place before engaging Public Enemy Three (or Four or Five or whatever mediocre rank the LA Anarchs were). Discount office suites surrounded a gloomy little byway. They'd been locked tight by now, leaving few peripheral exists; dim security bulbs glared down trashbins, weedy sidewalk, and rusted fire escapes. Shatterproof glass glimmered unwelcomingly in insufficient light. The far end of the alley was cordoned off by twelve-foot chain-link; gin bottles scattered the asphalt; far-spread streetlamps looked only as far as the claustrophobic concrete. _'Predictable,'_ sprinted across her mind before the spooked Foreman could stop it. Much she would've liked to deny her gristly analysis, assassination seemed terribly, painfully possible. _'Excellent. Fantastic. Hell, it's what I would do,'_ which was a sentiment she couldn't plausibly deny.

Well. There are a few ways to counteract something like that.

Ms. Woeburne stepped into the lane, walked as close as she dared, then pulled a gun and pointed it, sternly, in the direction of Nines Rodriguez's nose.

"Am I early," she said.

One sure way to get someone's attention is by saying hello with a barrel of lead.

"Yes, I know; a loaded gun; very startling; try to stay focused. I have good news and bad news. As they say. The good news is that I've found your name," S.W. informed him, a frightfully insolent greeting for a blackmail victim, tilting her chin at the Anarch's vacant, unhappy, stupid look. Momentum kept her upright and unafraid. The six millimeter saved her from any offhand maneuvers. She was aware how overblown this sort of confidence was, what with her finger perceptibly over the trigger. Provocative, yes. Brazen, yes. Foolish—partially yes, she knew. Marching in to meet warlords with a fierce face is reckless. But if watching courtroom politics gas taught an officer one thing, it is the importance of early-step control.

"The bad news," Ms. Woeburne said. She needn't finish. She held the weight of the pistol in her hand.

And the importance of showmanship. Whether or not you like it.

Shows, though. There's an adage about them—maybe you've heard; an unfortunate truism a lot of grandmothers say—about how they are compensating for something. In S. Woeburne's case of the slaphappy gun, her weakness is fear. She is not sure of what. But it is something, surely. There is always something terrific to think of and shiver.

Has she lived well and long enough to let herself be mortified by the thought of a knife in a basement drain? Don't let her justify this one. Don't let anyone tell you whether or not a horrible person deserves her fear.

Whatever it was and if she deserves it or if, in this time you've been with Ms. Woeburne, she's earned nothing that feels so slippery as a human emotion. The idea of fear is something solid. Adrenaline turned her neck unpleasantly cool. Jumping an Anarch with a handgun is powerful iodine for a hurt nerve, however; he blue-eyed at her handgun for a few moments before running through what its owner said.

"You want to get that six out of my face?" the Brujah asked, but being convincingly flippant is difficult when you're staring down an enemy gun.

The Ventrue was not compromising. A drop in the wind made her modest hands seem grave. The sleeves were cuffed above them, neatly rolled.

"No, I like it where it is. I told you this was poor form. You didn't listen to reason, so you ought to tolerate the consequences; though it doesn't seem you have any choice in that matter."

"And I said she was an uptown suit," Rodriguez remarked. Ms. Woeburne was not sure if it was meant to be dismissal or approval, and this offended her.

One response to being belittled is loudly pushing the hammer of your gun. Mortal recognition knotted, immediately, behind the Anarch's stare. She logged this as a victory. Even if he'd won their political clash, you don't often turn up quicker on the draw than a skulking Baron with a bad ultimatum.

"Do you know: it was a week before I could hold a pen properly. Same hand," Woeburne observed of herself. She aimed to observe very little of the Anarch; a streetlight glint off his unpolished rings wrought phantom pain through her cheekbones. If S.W. failed at looking casual, she aced hostile with a mighty aplomb. "I am here to do business. But let's be clear. I am not in a mood to jump through any more hoops. And I advise against you giving me any reason to follow through."

"I can give you a pretty damn good reason not to, I think. Got something on your collar," the Brujah noted. Confusion edged in; her pistol didn't falter; the Foreman's eyes flicked down.

There was a little red laser dot hovering smack-dab at the center of Ms. Woeburne's chest, bull's-eye between the lungs, roughly the size of a chickenpock. It was like an extra button right over her heart.

Kent-Alan leaned out of an overhead window with his rifle balanced on the pane, and tossed them all a wave.

"I see," Ms. Woeburne saw. The pistol slackened awkwardly. Her mouth shifted.

"Yep." Rodriguez was still a little distracted by the barrel pointing at his nose.

It was a legitimate standoff, if a mild one. The Toreador might've been able to handily snipe S.W. from his perch, but not before she'd splatter the walls with a Baron's brain.

In light of it: "All right," S.W. granted. "I get it. You're suspicious, and it's not unwarranted. But it's excessive, isn't it. When I've already gone through the trouble of your witch-hunt. You've brought what you promised?—I assume you have. I assume you aren't wasting my time."

"You'll get it when I get my name."

Ms. Woeburne's free hand dipped into her jacket and found a small plastic key. It was an MP3 device—the most innocuous recorder she'd found in a pinch. Tape left sticky prints and shirt lint on the plastic. If Jeanette Voerman had hugged her a little bit harder, or heard the tinny sample seconds S.W. played the Anarchs for proof, she might reconsider that shopping spree.

"Naim Carroll. That's your man," Woeburne assured them. "The full testimony is here. It's here and it's valid. Now I trust you will return my item."

If this disclosure startled him, Baron LA did not show it. Rodriguez waited an anxious minute, then held up the flash-drive from where it had been in his jean pocket. It was an inconsequential little thing. It tugged a string in Ms. Woeburne—a feather-light sensation of that nondescript fear—and she had a time of it not lunging forward and snatching the thing right out of his fingers.

"Good work, Cam." He tossed it. She did not lower her pistol to catch. The thing hit a puddle by her shoe and was done for—and good riddance, really. She did not need the twenty-buck reminder of how badly her attempt at having someone else had failed.

"And I know you haven't copied sensitive information how, exactly?"

He stuck out his hand for her end of the bargain. She refused, set the recorder down, and backed several steps away to let him take it. The Anarch stayed put.

"Guess you're going to have to take my word for it." Rodriguez almost smiled at her, but rethought it. The lazy confrontation scrambled with a coarser, halfway-to-threatening look, the inaccuracy of which annoyed Ms. Woeburne. "Same way I know you're not trying to throw a fastball, senator. I've dealt with your people and been burned before. But know this. If on the off-chance I do find out you fingered an innocent man—you can work out what happens."

Woeburne's damned sarcasm couldn't help itself. "Yes, I have worked this one out," she snapped. When you are cornered, cat, you shouldn't beg. Kick the hornets. Make fun of them. "You send Skelter, here, to blow my house down. We've established that."

"Actually, they call me Playboy," the Toreador shouted. He fired a blank in the form of one meaningless wink. "But it's just 'Kent' to you, lovely."

Ms. Woeburne shot back a deadpan _ugh_.

"Let me make the rest of this easy for you, Cam," Rodriguez proffered, no courtesy about it. S.W. could have shot him in the mouth. "I'm about to tell you exactly what you're going to do. You're going to drop your right arm, put the gun back in your bag, and turn around, hands-free. Where I can see 'em. Then you're going to walk straight out of here. Once you cross the street, you're free to do as you please. But you even scratch your ear before then, and K-Al will blow your face all over West Fifth."

"Yeah, sorry about that," Playboy called, wincing behind his sights. Nines's gaze was unnervingly conversational.

The Ventrue cooperated. She puffed up her lungs with a deep, steadying breath; the green eyes moved; the head did not. "All right. We'll do this your way," she told him, stooped for her ruined drive, and lowered the gun—by increments, baby-steps, the smallest fractions of perceptible movement. When she stood back up, the Foreman's fists ran parallel to her navel; the pistol was staring at the ground. "I never want to hear from you or her again, do you understand?"

Los Angeles's old kingpin said nothing meaningful to her instructions—only: "Leave, Woeburne. Right now."

And—contrary to all better judgment that screamed he would kill her at one fraction of a turn—she did.

And crossed Fifth Street, and walked swiftly to her car, and shut the doors. And locked them.

And drove away—out of the warm asphalt lot—from the Anarch Party—and back to her silent, unpolished, uninhabited house.

And so ended Ms. Woeburne's crash-course with loyalty games in The City of Angels.


	46. Children of Circumstance

Lily felt like shit.

Her forehead pressed into The _Asp Hole_ 's upstairs bar. When it touched, which she let it do, there was an immediate rush of feedback—a better sense of the shadows and carcinogens of the place, the feeling of cool enamel, a tangle of the smells. This is part of being a hunter, she figures. When you're feeling lost, you put your ear to the ground, and you see what's maybe nearby.

But that only helps if you know how to read the smells. And she didn't. Lily slumped forward in her high-legged chair, feet dangling limply, unwanted martini stagnating. She was bleached-out. Pale orange, jaundiced sockets, red tear ducts; her clothes were three days old and sagging; her jeans were unironed and the armpits of her shirt stuck against freckled skin. There was an ache pressing at the backs of her eyeballs nothing could subdue.

She never liked this club. Warbled Goth-rock was oppressing every corner of the smoky little Hollywood hotspot. Lily's college friends had always wanted to go here on the pretext of catching a glimpse of Ash Rivers, which meant she'd grudgingly tag along, fingering the edges of her fake ID but always just ordering coke. The amorous second-floor crowd was an upsetting backdrop to her depression. Wooden walls, black paper, sugar spill, dark carpet, the cycling remixes of songs she'd had never heard of, bits of culture that happened after her death. This fucking place was always too angsty for her tastes. But the bartender didn't bother her, and right now, that was enough.

Lily hadn't been inside a house for days. She alternated, with lopsided frequency, between sleeping in her dreary blue Nissan and on a booth in The Last Round. Except none of that was really sleeping. It was uneasy catnapping, the kind where you startled awake every few hours from bad dreams, or instinct, or remembering the predators who might enjoy rolling some unattended fledgling out of a car. It left Lily feeling stringy and exhausted. It left her wanting, more than anything, a place to rest.

E would probably take her back when she sank to knocking on his doorstep—scummy capris and shivering legs and all—but Lily couldn't bring herself to face him just yet. Sometime, probably, but not yet. God, what would he say? What was she going to say?

The Anarch Party had been encouraging at first. She got high-fives, arm punches, and gestures that passed as gifts. Lily felt like her toe had slid into home-base; it hurt; her disoriented, disregarded body was black-and-blue; but here they were to dust her off. Here were her new friends—bigger and smarter than the old ones—with a book of things to tell her, jobs to be done, bullets to put in a chamber. They were full of stories for little sisters whose tribute they wouldn't forget. They had all the time in the world.

Then they got quiet. Silence is the leftover hole when you aren't worth any more lies.

It was not an excommunication, exactly. No one grabbed fistfuls of her cute-colored shirts and chucked her out of a door. But every time she slipped through, melted into the weight of that belligerent place and breathed the smoke, her insides went to sand. Sandbag—that's what it felt like. Damsel let Lily in, but didn't have much to say anymore. Skelter was farther away. Playboy's jokes waned down and his offers of gun trades vanished; Jack didn't bother with the jeers. She hadn't seen Nines—not since that night, when she came back victorious, running in with a viciously swollen face and blood drying in her nose. He had taken Ms. Woeburne's things with a smile, and she immediately felt her insides clench. Something woke up. Lily hovered, drained, gutted of value, like a race horse who'd thrown her jockey.

" _Good work,"_ Rodriguez had said, pocketed his bargaining chip, the loyalty she'd switched. _"I knew you'd make it happen."_

Then he left, and that was it. He was gone from Lily's life in a series of steps. No one answered her timid e-mails. You could not even call him.

She's a bag of beach sand. Give her a poke and she'll start leaking her guts.

Her war paint sweated off; her knees still hurt from Ms. Woeburne's tile. But Lily is not stupid. She knew what had happened. She saw what this was.

She'd felt it coming. Some part of her warned that E was right; that you could not trust these people. This is the price you paid for some comfort. This is the blood-price for feeling safe in your thin, baby skin.

She hadn't even thought about Ms. Woeburne until tonight. What passed between them felt like a soft scab. There were other things to worry about and other people to worry what happened-to. Now, though—with the hate-energy winnowing, the fork-gouges mended, the black eye deflating—Lily began to feel remorse. _'How could I have done that?'_ she would wonder dazedly, never mind it was wrong or right. It seemed like jealousy was a natural thing to feel for your better cousins, the ones you knew would outlast you. But she'd forgotten what it was supposed to feel like. Lily couldn't remember if this was how it used to feel when she thought of Ms. Woeburne—a little regret, a little loneliness, and a little pity just for herself—or if this was another aftershock, a reel of emotion, the result of feeling what the Anarchs told her she'd be better off feeling when somebody said a Ventrue adage or a Ventrue name.

Weird how despair stops your appetite. It stops a lot of things, but what it doesn't stop are the needs of your body as it burns itself away. And after a while, her thirst announced itself; the aroma of dancers downstairs, exuding lively odors, made the thin-blood's fangs itch beneath their gums. Her ten fingers worried over the glossy woodwork of this bar as though they might extend and flex, like claws on an antelope's back.

She wasn't here to lurk and mope and feel sorry for herself. Lily was here to hunt.

Maybe you've read somewhere that a cat only catches a zebra one chase in ten? Lily was obsessed with chances, and E was aware of his Sire's squeamishness when it came to the pursuit; _I'm not a fucking animal_ , she'd tell him. _I'm not just going to run somebody down and jump on them._ Because she grimaced and pissed around and hesitated, E usually did the running. It never seemed very difficult for him. He would return in the wee-hours with some liquored-up woman—"sand-doll" was his word—taking no joy in it, but accepting the necessity. Lily hated feeding on snappy, silicone plasma. Tonight there was nowhere to look for help but herself.

She didn't feel like much of a bombshell in unwashed denim and sagging short-sleeves. But ten minutes later, a stool scraped up beside her, and a man was planted upon it.

"I know what you are," he sang out before she had the chance to look up.

Lily spooked in her chair, bleary stare frowning itself straight, back-to-normal like a rubber-band snap. It was a pick-up line straight from the paranormal aisle. Actually, it was sort of annoying; that voice had nasal vowels, large teeth, and a manic pitch. She looked at the face attached.

A scruffy guy—mid-twenties, perpetually jittering, a high-watt and too-big grin. Brown hair tousled over a juvenile expression that radiated something. Yeah, that was the only way to describe it: radiation. His smile was explosive and trivial as a fifth-grade science experiment. His shoulders were wiry and puffed out with an unseasonable windbreaker; ratty, checker-print sneakers tapped the floor. He couldn't sit still. He was fidgeting, heartbeat fast, knuckles rapping out a spontaneous beat on hardwood.

His eyes were hotrod gold.

"Miserable," Lily tried, upper lip tucked around her sharp teeth. It was a failed attempt at being somebody's smooth criminal. Still, being called out—even a come-on, even a joke—made her neck hairs stand on end. He shook his head.

"Cute, maybe?" she tried again. He waved a pair of large, theatrical hands ' _no._ ' The thin-blood chewed her tongue thoughtfully.

"Female?"

"Girl, come on, now. Don't be like that." Fed up with their guessing game, he hunkered down beside Lily at the counter, left arm resting conspiratorially against hers. The contact would have been offensive if it hadn't been so sudden. His bottom eyelids crinkled gleefully. Offense evaporated before it could get a toe through the door.

"I'm sorry?"

"You _know_ what I mean," he buzzed. Two strangers sitting like close-knit old friends: "I saw you from downstairs, and I was like HELLO. Can't fool me, nope. That's my radar talking. I can scope one of you guys out anywhere, no joke. "

"Um," Lily said. She tongued her canines anxiously. They didn't seem too noticeable. But there was clearly something off, something showing, a seam in her slouch or aura. Every sentence made him look more like he'd been sucking on live electrical wire. "Whatever you're pushing, I don't want any. I'm going now."

"Huh? I'm not selling you drugs, man, I was only… Oh, hold on. Are you still trying to play me? S'okay, girlfriend; I ain't gonna tell nobody." And she would've been leaving, heading toward the black woodstain on the dark stairs, but a heavy hand grabbed Lily's forearm as she tried to slide away. He must've seen her start to panic. "No, really. It's cool! I'm _connected_. I know the scene. And I'm not trying to, like, scare you or something. Just I saw you sitting around over here, and you looked sort of lonely—and since I haven't met you, thought I'd come over and say hola, you know? So, yeah. Hola, girl!"

The kid looked so harmless. Those wide, sunnyday eyes were wearing her down, and fu _ck_ _it_ _,_ Lily was so damn lonely. "In that case, double-hola," she gave him, feeling lame for handing back that dumb greeting. He let go of her elbow, and the moment of contact turned into something else: a victory pump, a two-handed high-five.

"Hell yeah," he cheered, lacing their high-five to pull Lily back towards the bar by her fingers, plopping her down. His exuberance was overwhelming, and she smiled weakly at it, bombasted by the dimpled grins. "See, I knew you weren't one of those bitchy Ventrue types. What're you called, lady?"

She was barely able to answer before he lunged for a shake. Her hand was snatched off the bar and trapped between his, which clamped down happily, jiggling the thin-blood's flaccid arm. She held on to her seat cushion with the other one.

"My name's Knox. Knox Harrington," he introduced himself, high voltage as ever. "Damn good to meet you, Lily Harris!"

"Yeah. Good to meet you, too." It was a mumble, and it felt like one, but she was taken aback by how true that statement was. Lily couldn't deny: he was interesting, and the sniffed-out vampire quickly became curious; she started sniffing back. "Can I ask how you know what you know? I'm sort of new to everything. And you seem… I'm not sure. But different, somehow."

"That's because I'm not like you. Wait. Who am I to say that, man? We probably have a lot in common. What I meant was: I'm not _like you_. I'm a ghoul." Knox was still grinning; his knee bounced against the underside of bar. Red floor light glazed against the jacket, bleeding navy blue into a hot, sickly pink. Lily almost made out a logo on the breast pocket, but couldn't imagine it was really what it looked like.

"So you just hop clubs looking for vampires, or something? Risky choice of pastime for a Saturday night."

"Well, when you put it like that. Not really, though." Knox shrugged, bopping his head back and forth on a tough, stringy neck. Somebody dropped their shot glass behind them and it shattered. A hostess in black swept by with a hand vacuum to suck up the shards. "I'm just doing my thing. But there's always a lot of you out in Hollywood, especially weekends, especially this place. For obvious reasons."

"Which are..."

"Oh. Ash Rivers. He's one, too." The ghoul fished a handful of coins out of his windbreaker pocket and began to count quarters; he had rolls of them, and wanted something to drink. "You didn't know?"

Lily wasn't sure if she should believe him. She wasn't a celebrity-chaser, and rifled through her spotty memory of previews and humid movie houses, landing on some vague sketch of an unimaginatively handsome face. _Ash Rivers. Ash Rivers is dead._ She wasn't sure why it should, or what he'd starred in, or who, beyond the penciled goatee and stage makeup, he'd been before. "I, uh. No. I didn't. I've never seen him—not in person. But I guess I can buy it. You and me. Why not him?"

"Owns this place, actually. He's probably lying on some skank in the VIP Room. Between you and me, girl, no loss. It's like: great, dude—you were in, what, two movies? Let's not bust out the holy grail just yet, you know what I mean? And let's be real." He waved down a bartender to order a beer. In quarters. Down went the napkin, the bottle, the glass, a snap of cap. The smell hit Lily during the pour—close, bubbling, honey, tooth-rot. It almost made her dizzy. It glowed like elm sap. Knox was sniggering through the first mouthful he took, and it hurt her watching it go down, left foam clinging to the baby five o'clock moustache hairs peppering his upper lip. " _Negative Zero_ was totally shit, am I right?"

Lily hadn't seen it. "Yeah," she agreed mindlessly. "It was way overrated. So exactly what is a ghoul? I keep hearing the word, but—" The sentence couldn't finish; Knox hurtled forward.

"Are you for real?" The ghoul's voice cracked against his upper throat. God, he was _loud_ about it, too; she jumped forward to clap a hand over that running mouth. Knox scooted away before her palm landed. "Girl, though! Come on with this. Nobody can hear us over that bass," he figured, running on the thrill, something he obviously did most of the time. "And we better cut the crap, anyway, because _hell_ , honey. You weren't kidding. You really are a total newb."

Lily studied him another minute, side-eyed. "You're not one of those Malkavians, are you?"

"I wish!" is not exactly the expected reaction to that question. "Weren't you listening to me? I'm a _ghoul._ For a Nosferatu, specifically." He shook his head and propped his round, faintly pimpled chin in one palm. And, just like that, Knox Harrington ate the apple out of Lily's martini. Granny Smith cubes crunched as he talked. "I don't mean to be, like, a jackass. I know you said you were new and all. But part of me is like: maybe you should be asking a vampire about this stuff. I'll gab with you, whatever; but I'm not exactly the Encyclopedia Cryptannica, here. You've really got to check in with your Sire."

It's just a word. A short one.

"Hey," Knox backpedalled, sloppy posture correcting itself, making the ghoul look even more unnatural and unfit for the proportions of his body. Lily didn't know what happened to her face to make him look at her like that. There was that word, and it really shouldn't matter to her—didn't used to affect her in this way—but then the air felt thicker; a sharp, barnacle pain twisted in her head; her consciousness felt like, for a second, it floated. The something changing in her changed him, too. Concern ricocheted across a button nose and lemon irises. It looked like someone had hit her in the liver. She couldn't see the trigonometry of her mouth or her eyes.

"Oh, man. I'm sorry. Did something happen to your Sire—is that it? I didn't know. I just saw you over here, and you were looking bummed out, so I figured maybe you might want someone to talk to. Really. I'm not, like, trying to bother you," he swore, curling up the set of his fingers, which had reflexively inched forward to hold Lily's left shoulder. But he didn't know her. He didn't know her, and she is what she is. They fell short. They fell.

"I'm fine. You're not bugging me. It's fine," she parroted, knowing it isn't, really.

"Seriously, don't listen to what I say. Half the time I don't even know what's flying out of my mouth. I mean, who the hell am I to talk about you?" he dared himself. "Some random ghoul just comes along and starts talking shit about my Sire, I'd be pissed. If I had a Sire. If I were like you. But geez, don't pay any attention to me; I'm not even in the same caliber as you, girlfriend. I'm no vampire. I _work_ for a vampire."

"Me, too. I work. I work for a vampire," the thin-blood swore, throatily, not sure why she needed to prove this so badly. Lily bit her tongue, retracting it behind punishing teeth. She could taste the swell of blood just beneath the malleable skin. "Or I used to. Look, I'm OK; it's not you. It's just that I've got a lot on my plate. It's kind of a long story."

Knox grabbed his barstool, screeching it against the checkerboard tiles and closer to her. Lily would have flinched at the long, grueling sound had she not been so fraught for a friendly face. Los Angeles didn't get a whole lot friendlier. For whatever reason, it'd thrown a live-wire, humming nut, who had two doubloons in his face, and scuttled in from nowhere, right to her chair. "Score! It's like, a complete and total coincidence that I happen to dig long stories."

"You probably won't dig this one." Lily grumbled it around her palm heel, elbow propped on a disposable coaster. She sighed and pushed the cork circle down their bar. "It's boring, honestly. Mostly me whining about how life's unfair; I didn't want this; blah-blah; poor me. But really, everything falling to shit is falling to shit because of me. I keep fucking up. That's what I do. I'm a fuck up."

The ghoul snorted through another stop-light grin. "Nah, girl; you are trippin. Like, I don't _know_ you or anything, but you're a lot cooler than most vampires I run into. Especially in Hollywood. Toreador usually just get all up in my face and tell me to fuck off. But you're pretty—"

"I've got a boyfriend." (Did she?)

"No, dude; let me finish my sentences. Not that you're not. Pretty, I mean. Because, sure, you totally are pretty. Also nice. Pretty and nice. 'Pretty nice,' I was going to say." A mote of relief eased through the pastiness of her stomach. "Let's get back to your problems. Because they are problems, right? I am, like, the master of solving people's problems. Kind of a ghoul guru. Hahah! Seriously. Who knows? I mean, I can't speak for my master or anything, but he's kind of a big deal, pulls a lot of strings in Santa Monica. Maybe I can help or something. Tell me what's eating you."

Lily barely opened her mouth. She got out _I don't—_ and then a _it's just_ —and then laughter. Not her laughter, but aggressor laughter—laughter in the thin-blood's face. She gawped at him, surprised, insulted, feeling a strange pang of indignity, not sure how to be.

"Nice. That's real sympathetic. I don't have to explain myself. And I'm not going to sit here, put up with some random asshole in my business, who thinks it's funny I—" she began to steam, but her anger tumbled right into the brick wall of a ghoul palm and it jumbled to pieces.

 _"What's eating you,"_ Knox spat, could hold the pun no longer, choked into his hand.

It wasn't funny. It wasn't. But God help her, Lily laughed.


	47. Unfinished Excuses

At four in the morning, Ms. Woeburne was at work.

It was proving to be an exceptionally humid late summer in Los Angeles. At night, thin mist stretched over the coast in a mundane shade of blue; streets pruning in lamplight leant towards the first glister of morning, and they were already muggy, dewy with smog. Skyscrapers caught arrowheads of white cloud. The shutters on the penthouse level of Venture Tower made spectacular light-glare, ricocheting onto highways and bus tops, where the earliest and latest commuters began their long clap out with pressed suits, cappuccino cups, and briefcase belts. They were at work, too.

You could find Ms. Woeburne inside her windowless Empire suite. Her dark hair was tousled around a tired face, glasses perched upside-down upon the bathroom counter, formalwear peeled and replaced with an evening robe. Black silk and shower suds are a marked improvement on eyeliner and shoulder pads, depending on your social preference. Clean feet and clipped nails; she does not sleep with a ghost of makeup on; S.W. will always double-check her keys and latch the deadbolt her door. Then again, you never really leave the office when your business is the business of a Camarilla Prince's.

That was all right, Ms. Woeburne thought, setting down a glass of blood on her desktop coaster. It was the way she was used to. So it was that, six o'clock in the Golden State morning, a Ventrue dabbed her mouth on a tissue corner, straightened upon a swivel-chair, trained both shoulders back, and went for one last grind.

The first message read her name in large blue company font.

 

* * *

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: GREENLIGHT SECURITY**  
**DATE: AUGUST 17 2010 3:04**  
**SUBJECT: INSTALLMENT APPOINTMENT**

 

Dear Ms. Woeburne,

We sincerely apologize for the delay. A company smith is scheduled to arrive at your residence on 8/19 between 7:00PM-9:00 PM to install the equipment. As a sign of our appreciation, we would like to offer you a ten percent complementary discount on your next purchase.

Thank you for your business,

 

Greenlight Security

 

* * *

 

Several hundred dollars in one push: doorbell camera, unbreakable chains, several combination keys. The next time an Anarch shows up at this address, she will find a bullet through her throat.

Ms. Woeburne's knuckles popped and pressed on. The Kleenex wore her lipmark and was folded into a neat, bloodstained square.

 

* * *

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: JOELLE LEFEVRE**  
**DATE: AUGUST 17 2010 11:11 PM**  
**SUBJECT: MISSED APPOINTMENT**

 

Dear Ms. Woeburne,

 

You have missed your gown fitting this past Sunday? The tailor called here and he was very angry with me! I have scheduled another one for you tomorrow at 8:45; please do not miss this one, as I do not know when he will be able to meet you again before September 1st. And you cannot come to Mr. LaCroix's big event in a suit.

Sorry to scold you, but, as you do know, it is my head on the immediate chopping block whenever you are late.

xoxoxo,

 

JOELLE LEFEVRE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES

 

* * *

 

Ms. Woeburne noted the grammatically misplaced question-mark. Still, she uttered a too-late "oh, shit."

Grumbling, the Foreman penciled the date into her calendar and kept on smacking the enter key. She deleted a dozen junk advertisements without reading them before landing on another message worth the effort of a decisive left-click.

 

* * *

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: [No Name]**  
**DATE: AUGUST 17 2010 12:02 AM**  
**SUBJECT: [None]**

 

Your lead checked out, Woeburne. That's it.

 

* * *

 

That's it. It was a relieving post-script to a dangerous door to close. [No Name] made her hands go cold.

Ms. Woeburne stalled for a minute, frigid fingers hovering. Were the Reds thanking her for a response to their _blackmail_? She mashed "delete" with the condemnation of great purpose. _'Yes. That will show them.'_

No matter. Lock shut. It was a legitimate In the Past.

Of course, there was still the matter of a hard-drive bleach in her imminent future. S.W. noted it and took one more pursed, pointed, discontented sip.

The next message:

 

* * *

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: SEBASTIAN LACROIX**  
**DATE: AUGUST 17 2010 2:12 AM**  
**SUBJECT: UPCOMING ASSIGNMENT – PRESSING**

 

Dear Ms. Woeburne,

 

I hope you are feeling well, as I have not seen you in several nights. Ms. Lefevre tells me you have indeed been by our offices.

I have a diplomatic errand for you. Because of the sensitive nature of this arrangement, I kindly request ahead of time that you check your tendency to barrage me with suppositions and simply do as I say. Thank you in advance.

You will immediately contact the Central Domain Anarch Party and propose a brief cessation of hostilities. Inform them that a Camarilla representative wishes to meet with them regarding the Kuei-jin threat, and that this meeting will occur in hopes of drafting an official ceasefire. The arrangements are to be set for September 1 at ten o'clock, afterhours at the Santa Monica Pier. This is nonnegotiable.

Convincing the Anarchs to meet with us on civil terms will likely require some tact on your part, so put your recent history to good use and persuade them. I strongly suggest you plan for a face-to-face preliminary within the next two days.

Rest assured that you will be appropriately armed. Joelle will forward you the dossiers of three escorts. You are permitted to requisition more personnel if you feel there is a particular need.

That will be all for now. Best of luck, though I trust you shan't need it.

 

SL

 

* * *

 

Ms. Woeburne took a moment. Sometimes you must cut these moments for yourself—when you need to catch up, recrunch the numbers, and lean back from your flat-screen to blink.

Calling the news "unexpected" would be understatement, because, frankly, Ms. Woeburne is rue not to expect a little bit of everything now.

A good agent does not like to presume on behalf of others, and S.W. confesses she is not entirely sure where your sympathies lie in this thing. For transparency's sake, maybe you'll let her take this window to tell you, directly, what the main concern with Anarchy is—why people like her take trouble with informal rule, feudal territories, and tribe titles. It is not just an issue of bad leaders, or bad women and men. It's a sickness in the structure of this Party. It's a piecemeal machine that, even when held together with everyone's hands, will never quite work.

Look at California and the problem is clear. Headship with no oversight—colonies with no empire—guarantees you nothing. These Free-State cities are drifting estates with no system of accountability. There is no use negotiating softly, and there's no sure way of securing alliances or making friends; they cannot coordinate with each other in a meaningful way to enforce whatever treaties they sign. Hollywood says yes with a shrug to "armistice;" Downtown says, with a gun at your throat, "I never signed that paper." Downtown opens fire, says, "We declare war"; Hollywood runs from your soldiers and gasps, "Unprecedented attack! War criminal!" They give each other weapons and they swap soldiers but they have no formal relationship to prosecute; they've got no ties to be cut.

Unless you trust in the lion egos and selective memory of "honorable people"—unless you believe in the justice of a mob—unless you think fear and love are adequate surrogates for the letter of law—this system will kill you. It is designed to make you trip into a corner where there's no other option but to forfeit or shoot.

Ms. Woeburne would not tell you what to think, less still what to feel about it all. But she will advise you, just this one time, on how to be what you are and not-die.

Mr. LaCroix gave Ms. Woeburne no advance notice. He gave her no ahead-of-time. She'd no prior indication a mutual pact against the Kuei-jin had ever crept onto his strategy table. First a Nagaraja, then the Italians, and now they were politicking the crows on their fence? What was it, exactly, that Sebastian intended to do?

September first. Mira Giovanni's overzealous—"promotion party" was the only phrase that jumped to mind. An Anarch armistice. Fast, neat little triumphs, all in a daisy row.

More importantly for her purposes: why me?

 _'Curious,'_ the Ventrue thought. _'Dramatic.'_ You know how Ms. Woeburne feels about dramatics. You know how short her patience for nonsense is.

 

* * *

 

**TO: SEBASTIAN LACROIX**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE: AUGUST 17 2010 4:01 AM**  
**SUBJECT: RE: UPCOMING ASSIGNMENT – PRESSING**

 

Mr. LaCroix:

 

Sorry to bother you. I'm in fine health—thank you for asking—but have been preoccupied and did not want to pester you.

I received your message. Bearing in mind my recent history with the Anarch Party, I will bite my tongue, but I hope you don't mind if I express some concern. Wouldn't a speaker be more appropriate? I will gladly forward this information to Mr. Chen for you.

Please accept my apology. I humbly ask that you will take this note into consideration, and understand your ultimate decision, whatever it may be.

Thank you,

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES

 

* * *

 

She fixed a dangerous word choice and clicked it away. There it was, damage done. Her request vanished into Venture Tower, nose-down, excessively polite.

That's it. Yes, that is it, indeed.

She suddenly was not very hungry. Her morning snack would go lukewarm, bubble thick, fade to clots in its crystal cup.

Perhaps Ms. Woeburne should be getting used to unsafeness by this point. The root of her lifespan had gotten tough and thorny enough to resist a few embarrassments; she wasn't made of the squalling and squeamishness of lesser servants like Joelle Lefevre or Roderick Dunn; but it was not some footsoldier march in Hendon. And this sort of diplomacy is not her prerogative. It is not her thing.

It is the exact sort of thing, in fact, that Mr. LaCroix assured her she would not have to do in Los Angeles. But did that excuse help her at all?

No, it did not, and you'll understand if Ms. Woeburne does not feel much consoled.

You'll understand if she cannot remember the color of a switchblade in a dungeon with spider-web walls.

You'll understand if she will not think about the fresh-milk, bone-white of her neck and hands the way they looked under Hollywood streetlamps in Sebastian LaCroix's limousine.

You will understand that her denial is not perfect; her blinders are not thick enough. Her fear is always scrabbling to peel through the calm, wail _run_ , and punch through.

A good rabbit knows that if you bolt in a snare, you will die. Your head will snap backwards and the tubes will swell until you are closed off from the rest of the world. You'll be quickly, cleanly dead—you'll be lying in the clover patch—no one will remember you—and who's fault will it be, pup? Small animals die because trappers can trust their proclivity to run.

Frowning and thoroughly unsettled, Ms. Woeburne tried to chase down a glint of good omen to work with. _'Look on the bright side, puppy,'_ her subconscious tried.

It's what Aunt Tab always called her when she was being difficult. Ms. Woeburne, in her childhood, had been awkward and terribly serious and difficult to adore. She had been quite badly pigeon-toed and clinked about on corrective braces well into her double-digits, bites of metal that made a twelve-year-old's attitude nip back. Did you know that? Childhood was doctor's visits; mean things other children said; a cage on her ankles. Not being able to get in the lunch hour lines because of some odd-angled stairs and always having to be driven home. What a sour face she must've had with plump cheeks and smoky eyes.

"Pup" was an auntie's faraway love. Her father's sister lived in Dublin and was always sending her cut-out articles and pictures of animals on the pretext she'd stick them on her wall. She didn't. But she did keep the word. _Pup_ meant chin-up when her legs hurt, when the braces gave her ugly sores, and badly-set bones kept a child pent up inside. S.W. was not sure why the babyish nickname stuck inside her head like this. But here it was. _'It'll get better; it'll pass by; this is just a hiccup in time. At least we're still in one piece.'_

One sharp piece.

The Foreman did what she always did: left-foot-right-foot, numbers on a list. She soldiered on.

 

* * *

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: JEANETTE VOERMAN**  
**DATE: AUGUST 17 2010 3:47 AM**  
**SUBJECT: fun in the sun**

 

Hi-ho, LaCroix Girl!

 

Your new bff here. You wouldn't forget me so soon, would you, gumdrop? Course you wouldn't.

You cut me a bargain and now I have one for you. Lady Chastity is letting me off the old ball-n-chain this weekend, and I think it'd be absolutely fetching if we had a little playdate in Hollywood, just us chickadees. I've got extra cash to burn through and you sure as hell aren't hurting for it, are you? Maybe if you pick up the tab I will even share some more filthy anarch skeletons. Viky's Secret & embarrassed Toreador. Sounds like summertime, am I right?

Get back to me, jellybean!

 

* Jeanette *

 

* * *

 

It was as much a trade offer as her formal master's—but it smacked of catastrophe—and LaCroix Girl did not have the time.

S.W.'s gut reaction was to hurl the message somewhere out of sight—she had been called a jellybean, after all—but her diplomatic sense thought snubbing one's informant might be a tad unwise. (Instead, refusing to have the address in her contacts list, Woeburne marked Voerman "not junk." It struck her as just.) As for the supposed playdate, just us chickadees? Forget it. Ladies' Nights in Hollywood are an obvious outreach, a loud suggestion of more silent side-deals; it was decent politics; but it was also, no doubt, extraordinarily messy politics. She'd sort out Jeanette's misguided friendship tomorrow morning, or sometime soon, when the tick-tick of anxiety forbade her any decent sleep.

 _'Though I suppose,'_ the officer had to admit, _'in exchange for more intel, it isn't too raw of a trade.'_

Perhaps it would behoove her to send Voerman Jr. a rain-check and grit through the expedition sometime in late September. What a pundit that would be, and what a scene, besides. Jeanette wasn't exactly the most subtle entourage—far from appropriate company for Prince protégés—but it'd be pity to fritter the opportunity away. Surely Mr. LaCroix would appreciate it if she handed him some extra dirt on Abrams's people along with the next report…

No. This was not her job. She unticked the message and buried it beneath a dozen others.

Left-foot, right-foot, left-foot, on. It was a chant she'd been marching a long time before corporates, the Camarilla, or Mr. LaCroix.

Ms. Woeburne got up long enough to pour her unwanted meal down the kitchen sink. She rinsed the glass, let pink water sit inside. A cabinet full of them, all stacked in order, top-down against dust. She was an ungentle creature with rushed priorities and cautious hands, but in this, she was more diligent than need-be, aware of the cost. Break one and there will always be another lookalike. That doesn't mean it isn't still a waste, and a shame.

She had forgotten to water the vase flowers again. Ms. Woeburne did not bother trying to restore them. She grabbed a handful of stem, petal, pollen, and she threw the day lilies out.

The chair squeaked when the Foreman returned. Her bare heels were quiet on cold tile, conscious of how they fell on the rug; toes pointed forward, muscle retention, steps mindful. Excellent posture; good training. She folded both legs and went back to work.

A new message. S.W. veered off and brought it up.

 

* * *

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: SEBASTIAN LACROIX**  
**DATE: AUGUST 17 2010 4:16 AM**  
**SUBJECT: RE: RE: UPCOMING ASSIGNMENT – PRESSING**

 

Ms. Woeburne,

You didn't honestly think I wouldn't find out, did you?

SL

 

* * *

 

It all got very quiet.

Yes, it gets quiet. When things like this turn up. Not thunderclaps, not sirens, but silence. It's quiet when a rabbit thinks about running. It got so quiet in that trim, polished apartment, the Ventrue's eardrums—dull and distracted ten seconds ago—heard her city. A fire truck pitched itself hoarse several miles away. Turtle doves clacked in their gutter roost outside. A raccoon dug himself into tamper-proof trash just around back of Empire Hotel's parking lot; in the lobby, a night watchman's leather shoes clapped marble, an aimless and boring hunt. Sixties sitcoms droned. Somewhere, stories below, a scrawny tom slipped off its fencepost and yowled embarrassment. Electricity hummed through two-dozen outlets and into plastic. There was a pain, a negative sucking, inside the confines of her head; everything went sticky and the edges got bright; something lapped like a seashore in the back of Ms. Woeburne's brain. The vampire swallowed. Her teeth touched in the dark of her mouth.

She will swear this to Final Death:

Her heart moved.

 

* * *

 

**TO: SEBASTIAN LACROIX**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE: AUGUST 17 2010 4:20 AM**  
**SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: UPCOMING ASSIGNMENT – PRESSING**

 

Sire:

I will be outside your office door in thirty minutes to explain everything.

W

 

* * *

 

She had absolutely no time for panic. Ms. Woeburne's jellies coagulated; her tendons dissolved; her major organs pumped ice-water calm.

Left-foot. Left-foot. Something must come next.

She stood up, fists balling at either side. With three steps, she was buckled in her most somber trench-coat. Keys hit her left pocket. Stockings sheathed both knees before their owner processed the action of dressing. Her uncombed hair went untended. Glasses slid up the forthright bridge of Ventrue nose. She was a glass turned upside-down.

Ms. Woeburne barely had on shoes when she received her response.

 

* * *

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: SEBASTIAN LACROIX**  
**DATE: AUGUST 17 2010 4:22 AM**  
**SUBJECT: RE: RE: RE: RE: UPCOMING ASSIGNMENT – PRESSING**

 

I don't recommend it. I am cross with you at the moment.

Do as I've asked. If you are successful, we will discuss the terms of your apology to me.

Until then,

 

SL

P.S. Don't miss any more appointments.


	48. Hellhounds

You believe in ghosts?

Some people do, some people don't. In his experience, the people who do believe are closer to the truth than the ones who demand proof, because a reasonable mind knows that not all things can be proven. There is a gray area. And he'll be the first to tell you: gray is uncomfortable. It's hard to look at and hard to see, so it's not difficult to appreciate why some would rather bury themselves in evidence and Q.E.D.s, in gameplans and strategy, than try to understand that middle-spectrum. Nobody likes to accept that there are things about this world can't be understood. Means they can't be controlled, can't be changed, can't be prepared for. Not completely. It means—no matter your cause or your ends or the stories you make up to justify them—you will never be absolute sure.

Here it is again: do you believe in ghosts?

He isn't one-hundred percent either way. Honest, it's not something he thinks about everyday; there is too much else going on, and big questions like this get eclipsed by the small ones. So you've got to decide for yourself which is scarier: if this _is_ fantasy, and there _is_ a supernatural; or if there's not, and all this misery is just the plain human state. You've got to answer it: if this world is the way it is because monsters are out there making the world sick, or if this is the way people, given a little power and under a little pressure, can be.

You've got to wonder: what would you do with a gun at your head, when you're backed into the wall and there's noplace else to go? Better: what would you do with the gun in your hand, and the bad taste of history screaming justice in your ear? Right from wrong looks easy when you're always on one side or the other of that bullet. But almost nobody gets to be the shooter or the guy getting shot one-hundred percent of the time. The rest of the time, it's just gray.

He asked Skelter about ghosts once, and Skelter told him: _the wicked return to the grave._

If not ghosts, what about lost souls?

It felt unpleasantly dim—unpleasantly gray—in this old garage, and Nines Rodriguez was flat on his back when the phone rang.

"God bless it," the Brujah cussed. He pushed himself halfway out from beneath the jeep, craned around the tire, and saw his phone lying on a carpenter's table full of acid burns, copper wire, and rusty secondhand tools.

"Red," he hollered into the bar's back room. No one answered. No one knocked through that dark door, down the four cement steps, spitting _what do you want_ and _why the hell do I bother_. Nines waited twenty seconds and tried again. "Hey. DAMSEL."

He looked for red shoes on the concrete. He looked for heavy little feet.

Worthless-broken-ass-piece-of-shit was a Chrysler; Skelter acquired three of them from a cousin of his last year (clean-cut young man was a ghoul now). Big family cars with room for bodies, rifles, gasoline cans. Nines remembered looking in the back of a van some kid stole and finding a babyseat. There was a bullet hole or two slammed through the plastic; could have stuck your finger through. Unsettled him. He had K-Al put it in the dumpster outback.

But they needed big cars. Nines didn't make trips anymore without picking up a bed full of bullets; _insurance_ , he'd say, stacking boxes in a pickup or a hatch, inbound for the basement they'd occupied in Griffith Park Observatory. Griffith Par—it was a place and a plan, Rodriguez's last-ditch contingency. They didn't talk much about it. He said it had to be done, and that was that.

Nines hadn't personally known Atlantic. But the people had a creed around these parts, as they did in most free States: a turncoat is a turncoat. It's bad enough burying fledglings full of Camarilla elephant slugs. Losing soldiers to their stock options is just fucking insulting. He'd made the call, but also kind of wished he'd been in San Fran when they handled it. Christina Kallas roped that kid's whimpering carcass to a dead bulldozer in a Caterpillar graveyard, crucified him to the giant tire, and slept on it through sunrise.

And if he was there, then he wouldn't be here, under this lousy piece-of-shit, looking at dirt and soot and whatever else.

The Baron had been on a safe house stocking run with Damsel when the shocks blew out. She was driving; he was sitting shotgun with a duffelbag full of ammunition on his lap and his forehead in his hand, watching her point out spraypaint, talking something about shovelheads and CDC. Nines hadn't been listening. It was important, too, but the plain fact is: you can't listen to it all. And he altogether stopped listening when a wheel hit that pothole, dropped, rattled the teeth in his head.

" _There it goes. What did I say? What did I say,"_ Damsel said. Nines grumped "damnit" and she limped them back home.

Funny it was always Red who seemed to bust everything. Nines had a theory she and Playboy went off-road joyriding up in the hills on weekends when no one was around to stop them. She'd just look at him and scowl real hard and kind of show her teeth. _What did I tell you?_ Damsel was always ready with that question when something broke down.

"Damsel," he shouted again. Would you believe it feels like trouble to look up and not see red shoes on a top stair?

But then, just on the eyewall of his worry, here came her heels slapping concrete, plastic punishing the cement. He knew it was Red because of the awkward, unnatural weight to the steps. He'd recognize her flat-footing anywhere, even though she'd got her own place and stopped living with him years ago.

"What," Damsel said, standing in the threshold, right there on the stoop of their garage.

"Do me a favor. Pick up the phone," he ordered without seeing her.

"It's your fucking phone."

Damsel, now—she'd start a fight just so she wouldn't seem easily pushed around, but you can't let that get to pissing you off. That's just her. That is who she needs to be. Got to be the tough one, in-your-face, hammerhead, meaner than everybody else. Got to be that nasty red. Fire hydrants and maraschino cherries; unmoveable, primary color, brute force. Disrespectful—all the time, disrespectful—gnashing and stomping around when people can see. But she needs that and he lets her have it. Damsel doesn't believe in ghosts. Damsel doesn't believe in too much anymore.

"I'm busy." The wrench skidded and stripped whatever was under it. To be honest, he was never very good at this shit. Never really had the patience for it. He expected his tools to work.

"Busy breaking shit. Skelter's going to end up fixing it. Skelter always ends up fixing it." Skelter wasn't here, though, and God forbid you let something sit around broken when the alternative is hearing Damsel bitch about it. Didn't have the staying power for a Rant tonight. Nines wanted to go home. "You may as well come inside and—"

"I know you ain't goin' to make me crawl my ass out from under this car," he threatened.

The Baron watched the red shoes bang around those large front tires, stop sharp, and disappear. There was a metallic thump as her bottom hit the hood, a scrape of legs folding, and she snapped _hello_.

"Nobody," Red said, and waited maybe five seconds before hopping down and hanging up. "Nothing. Waste of time. Probably a fucking pollster."

"Maybe less of nothing if you didn't walk in here backwards."

"Hey," she flared, "I'm not your goddamn receptionist. I'm not your PA." Kid sulked like a sour baby crocodile on slow nights like these. She cocked that knockoff beret over a mess of crimson and gestured some undkindnesses, but it was typical snarling. He licked his teeth and tried not to get madder than made sense. "Get a new bitch if you think I'm here to run your domestic shit, screen your calls. I don't do fan mail. I don't do front desk bullshit. You don't know what the fuck you're doing, anyway. So I don't see why you think you can lie there—just lie there—telling other people to fan your face, answer your phone, suck your dick, shine your—"

"Watch your mouth," Nines scolded.

"I don't see how in the hell can you—"

"Car out front?" the Anarch asked before she could steam again, hoping to shortstop the next bout of this. Skelter was due in. K-Al was probably around. Christie swore she'd be downstate sometime this week or next to thank them for everything in handshakes and firearms. Nines would take the handshakes, but he expected more of a deal than that.

"I didn't hear anything. And I told you already: those shocks never sat right. Hit one measly pothole and my head flies into the goddamn ceiling."

"Kick that over, will you?" She picked up the WD canister and rolled it under the jeep.

"I keep telling you: we need a better car. We need better transportation, period. I don't want to rely on Playboy's jacked shitwagons anymore. I'm sick of covering him. What if we had to outrun somebody in a fucking Chrysler? What the fuck are you going to do? Break out a pit crew? Look—you need to call Fresno's fixer, that Nosferatu kid, and put down some money. Just do it. We have to get something police grade if we—"

"Noted," Nines lied. "Now get out."

He applied a generous spray to the stuck joint. It glistened tellingly, but didn't do much else. And then his grip slipped a second time, leverage all wrong, right kneecap smacking into the jeep door.

"Fuck you, too," Damsel said. Nines swore antagonistically about the sting in his knee.

 _Told you, I told you._ She had just about-faced inside when the phone started again.

"Crying out loud," the Brujah cursed, scrambled out, and made a grab for it. He toweled oil off his hands and into his undershirt, used a forearm to scrape his face clean.

"Hello?" Rodriguez barked. There were thick black lacerations, looking not unlike blood, smeared over his ribs. They dried the cotton up and made it itch. "Speaking. What? No. That hasn't..."

A pause.

" _Woeburne_?" Nines tried, knowing who it was. There was another brief, uneasy silence and a disdainful, hesitant _yes_.

"You got to be shitting me," he ruffed, part confusion, other parts real disbelief. "What on earth do you want?"

Woeburne's is the serious kind of voice that espouses real business. But a good voice doesn't help her much here—he's already learned Ventrue sound like the sort of people that'd crack if you hit them. So the curt vowels and the stiff aspirations tightened the calm right off Nines's face; they crossed his arms; they made his jaw start to hurt where the big teeth clenched. She was just making overtures. Polite placations. The Baron of Los Angeles scratched the back of his neck.

"What the fuck are you doing?" he asked. It stopped her. All his weight was on one foot and he scowled, more like Damsel than Nines himself could ever see.

" _I'm sorry?"_

"You heard what I said. Will you cut to the chase sometime tonight? I do not care about pretending to be nice with you."

Woeburne stalled out. She seemed thinner, like a spitting snake with a boot on its gullet. They are a Camarilla breed of poison in LA these nights. Rattlers and cottonmouths. You'd better wear awful thick soles when you go walking around.

 _"I think it would be best if we met in-person to discuss this,"_ the Ventrue suggested; not that Ventrue ever really 'suggest' anything. Nines braced himself against the parked driver door.

"That's not going to happen, Woeburne. Not now, not tomorrow, not-ever. You got one too many reasons to put a bullet in me. But I'll humor you right now, sure. Say what you have to say."

 _"No—back up. You are misunderstanding me. You're not hearing what I'm saying. What I mean is: I'm reluctant to have this conversation over the telephone, Mr. Rodriguez."_ The voice fit around his name with adamant neutrality. Can you hear the dog collar clinking on somebody's throat? _"Your concern, given recent events, is—obviously. It's understandable,"_ she decided. You could hear the hatred that snake was holding down. All that toxin, that rotten blood, leaking through gritted front teeth and brigadier nose. _"This is bad timing. Clearly. So please appreciate this, and that it's bad timing on my end, too. We'll meet in a semi-public area. For peace of mind. It's a brief appointment; this is just a precursor to business, nothing contractual; but I must insist that I speak with you face-to-face. What I'm saying to you—it comes straight from the Prince. We can't risk interference."_

"What part of 'not going to happen' flew over your head, honey?"

" _Mr. Rodriguez. See reason, please,"_ the Ventrue clapped, a superciliousness do-so pushed from stomach to head to tooth. Her English snap-crackle-popped. _Please_ , though, marched on weak ankles. _"If you were in danger, I wouldn't call and forewarn you. But. If you doubt my intentions—and I don't hold it against you—don't come alone. Bring an escort. I will. Obviously. But believe me when I say that you will regret turning me down because of a baseless suspicion. Revenge does not interest me. We're beyond that. I'm asking you to meet as an ambassador."_

The Brujah was unconvinced by a well-rehearsed little speech. "Sure we are. Since we're being 'beyond that,' tell me something. How dare you expect to get more than a dial tone from me. Yes, Ventrue: I doubt your intentions. I got a restraint order placed on me and long list of reasons your people have to get me on a line—so I'm not particular inclined to believe the suspicions are baseless. Your ass must be out in front of a firing squad to ask this of me, and to do it now."

A tense intermission. Her freeze was enough.

Rodriguez sighed. _Jesus_ , he thought, then said. Set-up? Possibly, but Nines couldn't imagine why someone who'd just received a bona fide Anarch Treatment would roll up her sleeves and goosestep right back. There had to be a game he hadn't yet seen here, and unseen games are more dangerous than a snake with a pop-gun and a chip in her shoulder. His people were not ready and his reputation had good footing right now. Best to figure out what the fuck she wanted before this situation deteriorated. They tend to do that fast.

"What are you selling me, Ventrue?" the Baron tried.

Here's a thing about lost souls. They aren't fully emptied-out. Nothing is ever really that empty. Put a bullet through a body and blood swells to replace the gap. Dig your hand in the beach and pull out a shell; sand collapses in. Even a poured-out jar is full of air. When you lose something, another thing comes fast to fill it in. There's no faith required to see this one; it ain't science, but it's a fact. Need proof: get bit by a monster, die on a wood floor, look in a mirror. You're you without being you anymore.

Put a devil in the most loyal dog and you've got something made of evil discipline. Rochelle told him that one, and she knew about this shit. She was from a townhouse in Louisiana; her father was a senator, her mama was a Haitian placée married off a quadroon ball. Politics and a century of slaves. You don't get worse juju than me, she'd say. She'd say " _Want to hear a wild one?"_ Some call them Black Dogs: Cajedo, Cerberus, Fenrir. " _You believe that voodoo shit, honey?"_ she would laugh, not realizing it was being asked of a kid who had just swallowed some blood and been black-magicked into something else.

 _Hellhounds_. That's what he's heard.

Woeburne was quick. She was reliable. "Nothing."

 _Nothing_ , Damsel had said, her hand on that phone, her ass on the hood of the broken-down jeep. He finished it. "Nobody."

" _What?"_

"I'll tell you what, Woeburne. We'll talk because I feel like you earned a chance. But I don't owe you, or your boss, jack shit." There was a thumb hooked in his belt loop. It left tar stains on denim, marks he just couldn't care about right now. "Twenty minutes is all I can spare for you. I'll be at the old Good Samaritan at eleven. Whether you show up is on you."

Her tongue smacked the front of her grimacing bite. _"I've 'earned' twenty minutes of your time? You must not have much. You must be counting by the seconds now."_

Silence.

" _I didn't mean that. I'll be there at ten-thirty."_

"I'm responding to this as a courtesy to you, Cam. So I'd hope you appreciate that courtesy is not a commodity I usually have available for you people. This is your only shot, senator. Don't blow it," the Brujah warned, and closed his cell on her mouthful of hollow thank-yous.

Baron LA flipped the phone in one hand, back pressed against the window glass.

This was shaping up to be a Something.

It was probably a trap. Probably—but like it happens with dead cats, sometimes the probablies poke at your courage. What could these sideaways little fuckers want? Cutting that Foreman free had been the most charitable call Nines made all year; he claimed so with irony and with truth. She got a hard knock, but all things considered, that run-in was minor leagues, and Woeburne had been pretty fortunate. She couldn't seriously be gunning for payback. She couldn't be that cocky, or that stupid, or that well-armed.

How many cadets does a Prince burn through in a hundred years? Almost had to feel a little bad for old London. You almost had to cut her a break.

The Brujah snorted, pushing himself upright and away. He wiped the mess off his knuckles and went inside, face nonchalant as you please, handguns in their holsters where they belonged.

No. If you asked him today, a straightforward yes-no, then it's no; Nines doesn't believe in ghosts.

But he has seen hellhounds. They wear black coats and carry guns.

 

**II.**

 

"This looks like parole," the Baron said, dragged out a chair, and planted himself heavily across the fold-out metal table from Ms. Woeburne.

He wasn't shitting you. The sterile architecture of Good Samaritan Hospital was stuck in a cold, finicky halo of emergency lights—same kind of abandonment you find in haunted houses, sunken ships, prison yards. Who knew why it fell to shit like this so fast and so thoroughly. The place had been condemned for maybe two years, and though the structures were sound, the glop of disuse ate the paint off the place. It made these insides echo of sickness and bleach. There hadn't been a breathing body under these lights for a good long while. And there wasn't tonight, not in the clinical sense; soon as Nines walked in, under silent metal detectors and down the hall that said _TO PHARMACY_ , there the corpses were. They stood upright and awful clean beneath all that depression and all of the blue. Three sets of Ventrue eyes honed upon him. Their flesh was anemic; their papers were laid out neatly on a table with round corners over folding legs.

They were already unpacked, of course. Right there—right in the middle of this bad-dream lounge—Prince LaCroix's shooter sat straight-backed, collar crisp, watch ticking, hands folded beside a cheap snake lamp. You've never seen eyes that move quite like that—or maybe you have—checking and double-checking, not letting anything by. They hit her peripherals like a cat-faced clock, left and right, the tick and the tock. A ballpoint click-clapped between two fingers; a notepad waited lines-up upon the countertop. The closures on her three-button suit winked indifferently over cheap plywood. Intimidation, bureau-brand; nothing extraordinary about it. But lamp-glare hit the woman's glasses at odd, disturbing angles—sharpened edges that weren't supposed to be sharp—and it all made a Brujah's hackles rack itchy and defensive up his spine.

Two company soldiers flanked the Foreman on either side, shoulders flatter than a manufacturing line. Their whites shone like dogs in the darkness. They made no expressions, balancing Israeli rifles against their breast pockets. Fed hounds in a building people once went to get help. Nines didn't bother paving off his grimace.

"Good evening, Mr. Rodriguez," Woeburne whipped out and her voice was a Styrofoam plate in a five-year-old's hand. She sounded like paper being flicked. Click-pens and too-small front teeth. You had to hate her guts. Sometimes that feeling is natural; there doesn't always have to be a better story why. The skin beneath her eyes was thoroughly black and the eyes were hyper-focused—and Nines felt _looked_ _through_ —like that stare was solid mineral, had a caliber, cut right from the front of his cheek to the back of his head and bored out. It was like glancing down the barrel of a long rifle. She was looking at his face but did not, somehow, make eye-contact in a meaningful way. "I see you've joined us."

"Christ," said Mr. Rodriguez, a resignation, and the next thing to _hello_.

Skelter, temper at zero, walked in heavy as thunder, mean as a southwestern cloud. His boots punished the tile, left big dustprints; his glower was a more immediate threat than the g-men or the guns. He walked all the way around them, that ancilla and her unmemorable rotts, stopping straight across the lobby from all three. It was an attempt to make everybody more nervous than they seemed, to announce they'd taken precautions; no use getting fast-fingers or nasty ideas. Skelter usually did this kind of thing. Unlike Nines, who put a lot of himself into not looking scared, that man flat expected collapse and made no secret about it. _"This shit is going to go south,"_ he'd said so many times while filling his pockets, pack, and sleeves with live rounds. _"If we're going that way, might as well dress for it."_

Meanwhile, Kent-Alan—still wearing that well-loved corduroy, squeaking on his no-arch shoes—was failing at being anything _but_ nonsense. Kid sidled on in like a shit-faced guy showing up to an embarrassing date. He fired the first shot of the night, and it wasn't from the rifle strapped over his shoulder or the .38 in his pocket; it was a grin, a baby-face, a salute. Arrogant little fuck. Tossed his head, enjoyed being such a hopelessly blonde, clucked his tongue, and plopped right in a waiting-room chair. Dust wafted and the Ventrue tried to ignore it. Baron LA got annoyed himself, tell you the truth, but he didn't bark; not tonight. He knows the way Toreador goad. And he knew Kent-Alan. And he knew that arrogant little fuck was more than good enough for the thousand-pound ego he carted around.

"Make it worth my while," Nines proposed. His chair screeched as he scooted back, leisurely as could be under present circumstances, to kick out a leg and fake comfortable. It was all bravado and it rattled this pack of hounds. The Anarch's fingers drummed the tabletop between them. "I'd really like to know, Woeburne. What is going _on_ in here? Because I know you ain't here to make peace."

The Foreman was searing his rings with a concentrated look of malice; when she spoke, it was clear and humorless, and you couldn't tell if she hated their cause or their history or just hated the way a Baron's questions sound like a personal dare. "Don't mistake me. I'm not here to endorse anything. I am representing the Prince's interests—and, by extension, LA's," or at least that's how she justified it. Gold earrings caught powerful shine from the nearby bulb, flashed her nose and collarbone of color; dark corners gulped everything else. Her brunette bob had been pinned back into a neat, disciplinarian twist. Steamed shirtsleeves beneath a gray blazer; excess fabric peeked past the cuffs, over weak wrists full of blue veins.

"I'm sure that's true, Woeburne." The Baron looked belligerently elsewhere as he said so, as though she did not concern him, and he had better things to do. It would have been easy to upend the table and pull off her head. That's what you do when snakes get to bothering you. Embarrassing and brutal—the thought of how much easier it would be for troopers like that to hike up their submachines and shoot him five, ten, twenty ties in the unarmored expanse of stomach and chest.

"I won't take up much of your time." Counterfeit politeness. "Mr. LaCroix sent me as evidence of our integrity. We have a proposition we would like your party to consider."

"Bullshit." It just sort of fell out. Ms. Woeburne glanced up at him with a flimsy veil of disapproval.

"Mr. Rodriguez. Please." She scribbled something into her notepad. The Ventrue was pretty steady for someone who'd been duct-taped to a folding chair in a basement a few months back. For all those things that pissed him off, this is one trait about bluebloods you genuinely can appreciate. "This is meant to be an outreach. It's a sign of the Prince's desire to interact with you on civil terms."

"Civil terms."

"Find a synonym," she dared him. He left it alone. You learn to pick your battles at a certain age; you learn not to snap at every _you-peasant_ the Patricians spit out. "Let me frame this. Los Angeles has a problem with immigration, and in this context, I think you know what I mean. The Kuei-jin are moving unchecked. Since you are a part of Los Angeles, as we are, Prince LaCroix would like to lay out options. Again, if I may point this out: he sent his personal officer to discuss this with you," she threw in. "If that's not enough, you don't want to be reasoned with, and I suppose we are through."

"It's a sign he's a bureaucrat who throws flags at his Childer and boots them over the DMZ," the Baron said with too much aggression to have made a successful sass. One of his boot soles squeaked on the linoleum, actual anger, sudden energy. He sat upright too quickly. She did not flinch. "It's a sign you're stupid enough to double-over and take it. You flounced back into my Domain because what? Promotions coming up? Christmas bonus? What happens to flag-bearers, Camarilla? What do you figure he expects we will—"

"With all due respect, this is not 'your' Domain, Mr. Rodriguez. But I'm not here to debate language."

 _Tick-Tock_. She gets nervous, her eyes start to fan for _Plan B_ , for an exit, or for something sharp.

Nines bit his jaws together, arteries stinging up and down both arms. Woeburne stared at him from behind thinly-shaved lenses. She was scripted and sharp-eyed like a lawman—which he guessed Woeburne actually was—but it was not the talking-down-to that made him want to correct her 'language,' and, by the way, what the Foreman really said there was _fuck you and the horse you rode in on_. He quieted that old temper, tightened his lips around his teeth, managed to exhale.

"You are starting to test my patience," the Anarch got out. It was not a _you-people_. Woeburne blinked. His hands made fists on the table she brought.

"I apologize," she said.

A hound with a black coat can say I'm-sorry and make it twist like a knife. "Get on with it," he snapped. "What do you people want? Don't give me a speech."

The Ventrue observed him critically for another moment through the shadows they sat in. She relocated her spectacles with two fingers. He could see the metallic character of his glare, and behind it, the flare of Skelter's gun in that fragile glass. "This is only a preliminary. It was meant to judge your willingness and, given recent events, your… openness," she decided—carefully, "to dialogue. I've been asked introduce the possibility of a summit between our parties. Chinatown represents a growing threat. In anticipation of this threat, the Prince would like to discuss an official armistice. If you are receptive to the idea, we will send out a cabinet speaker with information; I, unfortunately, can't provide you with anything else."

"Which means you don't know anything else." He glanced over her shoulder at one of the gunmen. The nondescript Ventrue darkened, sneering, an equally nondescript threat of contempt. "Well, that's pretty much the kind of thing I come to expect from you."

"I can tell you, however, that when we ask for your attendance, you'd be very wise to attend." The stare shifted from her useless paper to a spot of air directly behind Nines's head. She did not look at his comrades. She had no prerogative or interest in them. "The Prince may not agree with your politics, and I am sure the feeling is mutual. But he takes your opinion in the district seriously. We hope this is not a mistake."

"So seriously he sends a soldier to do his diplomacy."

Woeburne did not even raise her voice. Her enunciation was overly exact. But there was that crinkle—subtle and malicious—in the narrowing skin beneath the Ventrue's eyes. "You're speaking to a Board representative. You are speaking to an active member of the upper court. You keep bringing up your time; I expect you aren't wasting mine."

Rodriguez tilted forward to study her watch; he hadn't worn one. She took instant offense. She removed the arm from their table and placed it beneath, over her lap, out of sight.

"I expect an answer," Woeburne said, politely—and this one was, by all measures, a threat.

"Look, it's possible I'm confused, but seems to me that you came out here—not to negotiate terms—but to see if maybe I'd be open to meeting with your people. So I'm wondering." A flat, disdainful glance at Ms. Woeburne and her ubiquitous notebook. "What would you call this?"

She said nothing. The Foreman looked troubled, frowning at nothing in particular, a concern beneath furrowed eyebrows and penciled lids.

The Baron's sigh was melodramatic and annoyed. "Count on the Ventrue. Count on you people to call five conferences to get one done. I was real clear with you on the telephone, Woeburne. I said _a_ shot," he reiterated. He repeated himself. "I didn't say two. If what you're talking about is a legitimate offer, and our part is priority, you'll lay down exactly what LaCroix expects from me before I walk."

"As I've already made a note of pointing out: I don't know." A relatively passive reply, but Woeburne was toeing the line of smart remark now. Maybe she recalled the previous occasion they discussed how much information was at her fingertips. "I'm frankly not sure what it is you want me to say."

Rodriguez's knuckles were tapping the furniture again, an uneasy rhythm. Each beat stiffened the snake's masseters one stitch. Do you know what an adder looks like when it's thinking about getting ready to bite? "That's too bad, then. Guess we wasted our time. Anything else in this city you want my _opinion_ on, senator? Identity politics? Midterms? Hillary Clinton?"

"I'd like you to reconsider." It was not a friendly _like_.

"You think the democrats will do anything this year? Because frankly these streets are a mess."

Woeburne's palm heel on the table. It made one solid _bang_.

"I say something wrong, here?" A blueblood will bait you; doesn't mean you can't bait back. "I apologize."

"If I may give you a piece of advice. I'd take this _extremely_ seriously," she warned, straight-faced, but just barely. It was an ominous aside. Woeburne looked about two more offenses from ditching decorum and barking at him at the top of her awful little lungs. The thing about Camarilla jarheads is that those jars are hard, but not impenetrable; you have to tilt the floor beneath that ruling-class calm. "You offered me one shot, so I'll offer you one, too. The Prince will not wait on this. You are expected to respond. A real response. Leave us no other option, and you might find the nature of those expectations change. This is an opening he's set aside for you. And I have no intentions of returning to him with nothing but—"

"So you've got more hoops to jump through this evening. And… this is my concern how? I'm not going to drop my pants to make life more convenient for some trumped-up intern who wants the corner office."

"I am trying to make this crystal clear for you." Her hands were flat on the countertop, fingers spread wide. Woeburne was more dangerous than she sometimes let on: a pocketbook, a pistol, and a deadly short-fuse. They were flammable combinations, and when you gave her a good shove, the safety trigger started wiggling. She had a trip-wire buried. You couldn't usually see it. Practice packed that live cable down, but gouge the pliers deep enough, and it'd start to smoke through all the bootblack, all her company stuffing. "You can mock me; go ahead. But you know better than to do this. You learned a piece of your lesson. And you'll learn the rest quickly if you intend to stay where you are. Your worshippers can think whatever they want, and you can play at being a king, but this city knows your day has passed. _We_ _k_ now that there is nothing forcing us to strike treaties with you, Rodriguez. And I guarantee you won't like the alternative. Your holdings—your life on the line—on our line—and you think you can—"

"My life on the line? More you talk, the more I'm starting to rethink this whole deal." The Brujah's pointed look made no ceremony of its challenge. "In fact, I'm thinking I don't want a damn thing to do with anything you touch, Woeburne. You say I need to take this seriously, but you're the one up on your feet. Here's a warning." His glare caught hers, low indignation, old feuds that boiled back before this despaired hospital, before the city it sat in, and long before either one of them. "You raise your voice at me again, I tell my 'worshippers' that you're no longer a protected species. Then we can discuss exactly when my _day_ is over."

"Enough of that," she snorted. The suit's quills shivered. They were trading bad attitudes, and those were real, you can believe it—but the rest was mostly showmanship, a ritual testing of each other's limits. You had to shake Ventrue a little bit. Then you had to move on. She settled, ironclad, back down in the seat. "This is pointless. And it's irrelevant. We're being reasonable. But I don't owe you an extra explanation. I'll give you exactly explanation he gave me. That is my role. That's my job—don't you respect that? So go ahead; debate it, pick at my words, but don't conflate your issues with ours. This is politics. But what you're doing," Woeburne scoffed, flicking her finger back-and-forth, "has nothing to do with the Camarilla. This is about a dead boy. This is about an order you were given and a concession I—key: I—had to make."

Skelter shifted. Playboy looked like he was watching good TV.

"Woeburne, I got sad news. This ain't about you. This ain't about you, at all," Rodriguez told her, and this one was, honest-to-goodness, true. "Maybe you think it is, and maybe I'm supposed to, but we're not that dumb. We that dumb? You tell me."

"I've told you," she menaced, "everything I can. You'll take it. Or get out."

Finish the sentence. Out of where?

He didn't like his options. Sometimes you don't and you got to make do. "Just where would this meeting take place?"

The Foreman took a step down. It looked like the yank of a bandage. She filled her lungs, dropped both hands to her knees, posture still excellent. He imagined LaCroix Foundation tolerates nothing else. "Santa Monica Pier. September first at ten o'clock. That is neutral ground. It's highly defensible, it will be closed for repairs, and should be secluded enough for us to speak openly. We thought you would feel more comfortable outside our immediate influence."

"Would I."

She looked the needlessness of that protest square in the eye. "Don't ask me rhetorical questions. Either you will, or you won't; that's all."

And she puts on a good act, Woeburne. She puts on a mean, metal face; World War Ace, Bristol Bulldog, fighter pilot. But you can see that the whites around those pupils, around the blades of the clock, are just a little too open, and a little too wide.

"You don't want to be here," Nines tells her, and this is not a nice thing, but it's the truth, too.

The Ventrue stared. Snakes are lidless. Sometimes you think these people never close their eyes.

"I realize that. Nobody wants to be. I understand it. But you're out of minutes, and I've got better things to do than sit here being snake-eyed by you," he announced; this here is the point where that truth, that shared ground, begins to go gummy. The Baron glanced behind him enough to say _time to go_. "I'm hearing a couple of things. If we're going to try this, trying it outside our territory is not a wrong instinct. But the Voermans don't talk to us, and Santa Monica is not my idea of a smart place to try anything—not with you people. So the goodwill is going to have to be yours. Are you hearing me? You send your talking heads unarmed; I'm bringing a complement; the Board will have to appreciate that I'm being asked to risk my neck on a half-chance and an invitation from your Sire."

"From the Prince," she cut. There was an air of correction. "Yes."

Woeburne monitored as they mulled it over. Rodriguez's back pushed into the insubstantial chair, mouth turned downwards; one of his hands deserted its slung-out position across their table and rubbed hard at his cheekbone, dragged the side of his face. His eyes were darkly ringed and spoke to no one. If the Foreman had extra counsel, she didn't give it; the Camarilla seared some stoicism; the Anarchs stood where they'd always been standing, unflappable and silent on either side of Good Samaritan's exit door.

You want gray lines, bad choices? You got them.

"Fine," the Baron chuffed, finally. " _We_ will be there. I make absolutely no promises, but I can tolerate hearing the Prince's lawyers talk. Don't let my willingness to cooperate with you bloodsuckers go unnoticed by this city's upper circles. And London."

"Yes," she said—no leeway, no question-mark, no indication of relief behind the green animosity of Ventrue glare.

His was a pickaxe to the ribs. "If you are in any way fucking with me, your life is forfeit," Nines pledged. A fork in the side; a cloudburst of ill will. "You should know that my people will have you in their crosshairs until this is resolved. Anything goes wrong, I blame you. If Venture's boys aren't there—some bootlicker gets out-of-line—your head rolls. That is my promise. So. Pick up your papers, scamper back home, and make sure those bureaucrats understand that if they try to knock me off, there will be consequences, and nothing you can-carriers can do to me will stop them. You better shoot to kill. You better not miss this time. Because if I live, if I want, I will squeeze the black right out of your heart. And you can tell Papa Warbucks that. Is this clear?"

Woeburne did not move. Her arms were pale from elbow to fingertip on the rickety countertop. She swallowed.

"What makes you think that changes anything?" Spit-shined Tahitian pearls cackled around her collarbone. Bright and cyanotic, the carotid plunged beneath them, curling around the back of an ear and disappearing into grim brown hair.

"Doesn't. Take it as a little incentive for you—good reason to cut your losses now, back out if there's something you're not telling me." There was and there wasn't. Woeburne's eyebrow jumped. Make curiosity look like indignity; you're still curious, and there's still a something you aren't sure of, something you'll need to worry about. "Otherwise, my advice is not to sweat all the fine print too much, senator; there's not a goddamn thing you can do about it. If, like you say, LaCroix does want an arrangement—and it pans out well—then I guess there's nothing to worry about. If he doesn't…"

"I see."

"It's not exactly my problem, London."

A cluck of the tongue on the roof of his mouth; a flaunting, bullish "too bad." She resented that he'd gone ahead and finished it, even after she'd given _I see_.

"Not London," the Foreman sniffed, collecting her loose-leaf and forgetting her pen.

"Excuse me?"

"Leeds," she said. "I'm from Leeds."

London rapped her documents against tabletop to straighten them, gathered the excess edges, and sighed. It was an honest expression of fatigue. "Once more, so that we don't misunderstand one another: may I tell the Prince you will be personally present on the first?"

"I don't give a shit what you tell him, Woeburne. I'll be there before your people arrive. But for now, I'm done with you." And the Anarch rose with the rifles of those faceless Camarilla guards. Playboy and Skelter reacted, pointing at the Foreman's breastbone. Rodriguez waved them down. Having launching upright, startled by the flamboyant little trigger show, Woeburne realized she ought to do the same and gestured her contingent to put their guns away.

"Fine. I'll relay this and have someone confirm with you one week before." I'm done with you: one terse nod with a triangular chin, one arm hugging her notepad between tricep and ribcage. Finally, unmistakably, she seemed relieved. The bleached look dulled, the severity quieted (marginally), but the Ventrue did not shake his hand. "Thank you for speaking with us on short notice, Mr. Rodriguez. And for speaking with us."

Hers was a hollow thank-you; the bulblight had gotten too hot, too persistent, a nuisance on brow, arms, face. It made his frown stern. "I don't want to hear that. This is a preliminary," he quoted her, meaning it to be a joke. Nobody noticed. She left her lamp on, not caring about the Brujah's squint, not drawing parallels between the dead way all these eyes looked through two different derelict rooms. "It ain't a real thing."

"Isn't," shot off her tongue before Ms. Woeburne could leave or think better.

"Isn't what?" Rodriguez asked. Venture's ambassador was still preoccupied with her briefcase and the wrinkles in her sleeves.

"Isn't a," she clarified. Clasps snapped into place along the leather report carrier. Ms. Woeburne—clicking shut buckles, goals met, business complete—seemed unconcerned. Her escort began to look uncomfortable. "It 'isn't a' real thing."

The Baron stared a minute.

He thought about saying something, thought enough to start—but, since that light was still hot and the Ventrue was still threatening—didn't bother, shook his head, and walked out of the meeting, back into the old, untaken quarter of downtown.


	49. Out of Contact

**TO: RODERICK DUNN**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE: AUGUST 20 2010 11:30 PM**  
**SUBJECT: REQUEST UPDATE**

 

Roderick:

Have not received expenditure report from Hendon in some time. Requesting general assessment and accounts update at your next convenience. Please forward any extra concerns and/or overdue messages to my local office. Will be in touch upon receipt for questions and any necessary adjustments.

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATON  
LOS ANGELES

 

* * *

 

 

**TO: RODERICK DUNN**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE: AUGUST 25 2010 2:34 AM**  
**SUBJECT: REQUEST UPDATE x2**

 

Roderick:

Have yet to hear from Hendon staff. Reiterating update request for general assessment in case my original message was lost. Please contact when you have a moment; please attach recent reports, including new accounts for the past week, and any relevant concerns you may have.

Sincerely,

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES

 

* * *

 

 

**TO: RODERICK DUNN**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE: AUGUST 29 2010 10:58 PM**  
**SUBJECT: CONTACT ASAP**

 

Roderick:

Reports absent. Notify me when you receive this message.

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES

 

* * *

 

 

**TO: SHAUNA BRECKENRIDGE**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE: AUGUST 29 2010 3:21 AM**  
**SUBJECT: NO CONTACT - PRESSING**

 

Shauna:

I haven’t heard from or received intelligence on Hendon in approx. thirty days. Formally requesting a situational update. Please let Roderick know I’ve made multiple attempts.

Have an overhead representative contact me as soon as possible.

Regards,

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES

 

* * *

 

 

**TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: RODERICK DUNN**  
**DATE: AUGUST 31 2010 11:56 PM**  
**SUBJECT: AS REQUESTED**

 

Ms. Woeburne,

 

Apologies for the delay. Please find the full expenditure listing from August 2010 attached.

Nothing of note to report. Situation is business as usual and, as of this note, your counsel is not needed.

Best,

 

RODERICK DUNN  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
HENDON ESTATES


	50. Wednesday Child

As it tends to do some time in summer, September first rolled on California, and Ms. Woeburne was still alive.

' _Slightly dead. If you want to be technical,'_ the Ventrue corrected herself, roundabout the time she realized this barrette was most definitely stuck to her head.

"Of course. Of course I did. That's cute. That's perfect," S.W. spat, sucking lipstick off her teeth. It was crescent-shaped and nasty with diamonds, and it snarled into the blackish baby-hairs at the base of her scalp like a thumb of pinecone. Woeburne wrestled for a few minutes and managed to make it worse. ' _You can barter-down the public enemy—have a good blackmail, yes—but you wait until the fruit basket social.'_

It took yanking out a rather alarming handful of hair before she gave up and went for scissors. Standing there in her suite kitchen, blades barely fit for printer paper eating a hairsprayed chunk, Ms. Woeburne was surprised how unglamorous being alive for this gala turned out to be.

Of her own preparations, she would only say this: the Foreman kept all appointments. But she might as well have skipped the fitting, because this dress hugged like spandex on a poorly-posed mannequin. The cowled neck was archaic, the length was lopsidedly modern and color funereal black, and it looked like it should've had sleeves. The belt was sewn-in silver, links with turquoise eyes; it synched her bones awkwardly. If you looked at her sidelong, took a step back, Ms. Woeburne was more like some feeble attempt at New Year's Eve chic than a well-liked city diplomat, though she supposed no one had ever liked her, and diplomacy is too strong a word.

Wealth is a stutter of detail and it's all about the balance of disinterest with excruciating care. A floss-fragile necklace she knew would snap off during the night was downplayed white gold. Her sandals were pretentious, outdatedly Roman. The glasses lay parked beside the sink. Her lipstick was stupidly blue.

She hacked the clip off.

Free again, S.W. pitched it into a trash can, the thunk a minor relief, then dug it back out—because it was wasteful, and because it was company money that bought all her things. Prince LA was open-fisted with those who served him well. Like his descendant, he was not, however, appreciative of waste.

And by no means could this descendant afford to irritate the monster who made her again.

One terse, cool letter had arrived a week ago. It wasn't foul tidings—not, you know, so to speak—just a general air of disapproval, a familiar effect of the author's brusque tone.

 _Dear Ms. Woeburne_ , Sebastian wrote.

 

* * *

 

 **TO: S WOEBURNE**  
**FROM: SEBASTIAN LACROIX**  
**DATE: AUGUST 25 2010 2:04 AM**  
**SUBJECT: YOUR APOLOGY**

 

Dear Ms. Woeburne,

 

I forgive you.

A chauffeur will collect you at eight o'clock for the event. Kindly take care not to be late.

Best,

 

SL

P.S. We all must solve our own problems in this world, Ms. Woeburne. But in the future, be sure the problem in question is actually yours to solve.

 

* * *

 

Ms. Woeburne hadn't bothered editing the transcript of that evening in Good Samaritan Hospital before she turned it in to Mr. LaCroix, something that was expected of Board members, even of her. (Who wouldn't want to tweak an unfortunate word or x-out a misplaced _son-of-a-bitch_ , given the chance?—not to be nefarious, but just to make sure the best version of yourself goes into the book.) It didn't matter this time. She was almost certain both "escorts" Mlle. Lefevre referred to her were spies. _Fine_. S.W. had nothing to hide; let them report on her loyalty, composure, and bayonet chin. Normally being suspected of wrongdoing would've have bruised her feelings, but a) it was true, and b) it was the fastest way to earn back LaCroix's confidence. The wrongdoing in question had been a frightened bad judgment, not treason; Sebastian would've been much less forgiving otherwise, and far more aggressive about it than coldweather, patronizing e-mails.

Well, anyway, relative innocence is neither here nor there. She didn't need him to forgive her for being a disappointment. She needed his pardon for committing a security breach. And she wasn't looking forward to discussing her lengthy list of shortcomings with him. No, she wasn't counting down the minutes to that, at all.

A lecture is better than being staked and publicly beheaded, of course. Perhaps you consider the lightness of his lash as a sign of affection for a learning protégé, indirect and backhanded as that affection seems. Or perhaps Mr. LaCroix simply didn't consider her occasional bumble significant enough to cause him lasting damage. Either way, Ms. Woeburne—pompous little head firmly attached—couldn't really complain. _'Any one you walk away from. Any one that doesn't kill you, I suppose.'_

She dabbed a stinging flake of mascara out of one eye, heard her buzzer ring, flung on a gauzy shawl, and scuttled downstairs. It was cornflower blue. Her shoulders were cold, and the color was, too.

The car ride, as they usually tend to be (at least when one is not thwarting assassinations or sweaty-palmed anthropologists), was unremarkable. Woeburne let her posture to go to straight hell for the seventy-minute trip into the north suburbs, since she'd surely be racked straight as a bargepole until closing, or whenever Mr. LaCroix decided it was time to cut her loose. Frankly, it seemed to S.W. a waste to be around for this. She may have been cabinet material, but wasn't exactly in the Prince's entourage (especially not at the moment); in fact, he'd yet to formally present her as his Childe, something Ms. Woeburne couldn't decide how to feel about.

Well, anyhow. You know reason doesn't mean peanuts when it came to formal affairs. And there was no way in a shadow of hell she'd play hooky after the series of misfortunes last week. _'Forget decapitation. If I called in sick on this, LaCroix would have my eyes. Replaced—with dynamite—light me off like a business-class sparkler.'_ Zip, pop! Wouldn't that be a little bloodsport for the proles? Wouldn't it be a conversation starter.

Ms. Woeburne cleared her throat, pinched the bridge of her nose.

 _'Yes,'_ she thought as the driver turned left and rough asphalt fell to manicured, immaculate grass. _'I should probably see about my vacation.'_

Or her return trip. It wasn't really worth it—planning either scenario—but in a matter of months, S.W. could tell you Los Angeles is not refreshing, and it would never be her home. At this point, she observed with a snort, skedaddling back to the bluster and boredom of Hendon sounded restful. What it would not be is welcoming. _'Slinking back to the penny-pinchers and the paperwork. To Roderick's bellyaching one step past my door. Depressing. What I require is an actual holiday. Inland—no fish, no palm trees, no beaches. Somewhere landlocked and clean. Maybe Vienna.'_

That would be an interesting classroom experience in Tremere etiquette, if nothing else. She'd never been. It seemed embarrassing. Church-spotting and pony shows had never been this Ventrue's thing, per se, but neither were Anarchs, and Free-State riots are front-and-center in West Coast; it is a muddle of interest conflict, a blip in the thermostat. This city did not appeal to her sense of decency. And it certainly did not appeal to anyone who could be cut open to the dark DNA from Sebastian LaCroix.

There was too much Sebastian LaCroix bleeding through S. Woeburne these nights, and there was quite a lot she stood to lose it to.

The Ventrue flattened her dress, tipped her chauffeur sixty dollars, and stepped out onto the crunching Astroturf of la Camera del Giovanni.

 

**II.**

 

Within the next hour, Ms. Woeburne was sitting at a cloth-draped gateleg, toying with a glassed candle and listening to Prince LA's speech.

Sebastian LaCroix, deciding his opening speaker wasn't adequate, had beat the poor Ventrue orator Joelle hired onstage. His clip was hasty. It always was. They didn't like it about him, the Giovannis—they did not, you could tell, care for a man who kisses no hands and who walks like he is rushed. But the echo of a Prince's shoes on that platform still ended all other conversation. They may not like him in Los Angeles; they may not like him in these crisp, overripe hills; but, whether you like him or not, a city listens to a politician speak. Applause followed, dreary and obligated, a hearse. It was a terrible metaphor, S.W. admitted, but sometimes the terrible ones just are.

Prince LA had been frowning to himself on the merciless marble floor of this house. He carried that frown through the gowns and long ties; he carried it across the pinks and blues of spider-web stone. And he carried it, quite unconsciously, up a tall flight of stairs to the awning they'd dressed like a stage. The banquet hall and its banqueteers eyeballed expectantly. Powdered cheeks, combed eyebrows and round, calf eyes; he knew the type; he didn't hesitate. He did not trouble himself with the event schedule. Mr. LaCroix simply stepped up to the podium and placed both hands on its polished obsidian face, waiting for quiet. You could see, in that interim moment, that he was not particularly pleased to be there.

But two beats later, the Prince smiled anyway—a grand, overlarge, and false expression of teeth. His blondness burned beneath overheads, slick and Edwardian. There were no shadows to break across both shoulders of Mr. LaCroix's new suit; it was an ill-fitting, summer-white. He looked like a TV Baptist. Ms. Woeburne thought it was bit of a carnival. She looked silly in her lion mane of a cowl. She almost burst out laughing.

Which would have been a bad career move.

"Friends," the Prince began. He forced a sophisticated happiness that did not enjoy itself. (Probably because he'd bitching up a storm about these so-called "friends" tomorrow night.) "I am pleased you could join us here to celebrate the formal announcement of our relationship. I think I speak for all of us when I say this announcement is sadly past due. But before we move to business, let me first take a moment apart to thank our hosts for welcoming us into their home. Please show your appreciation to the patron of this family: Mr. Bruno Giovanni. Bruno?"

Polite palm-pats, carriage-on-cobblestone, showered the graying patriarch, his bulldog jowls wrinkling from a center table. Bruno was an old-money vampire who looked every bit the gruff, bad-tempered brute his niece described. He wouldn't spare a grin, even for the toast. Ms. Woeburne felt gratified to know his pompous disregard would plummet in about fifteen minutes. And she felt gratified not many other people did.

 _'What all go-to-girls think, I'm sure.'_ _It was_ Jeanette Voerman's term. Therese was here tonight, the Foreman realized, and hoped they wouldn't be forced into mingling at some sidelined corner, hahing politely at one another's bad puns. Ms. Woeburne stopped clapping long enough to trace one fingernail around her melting candlestick. Bright wax the color of dahlias sweated into a volcano, slumping snake tails down the far side. She took a bored, agreeable sip of chilled _A+_ and listened to Sebastian talk. It sounded like a fundraiser. He wouldn't stoop so low.

"Yes—thank you, Bruno." Mr. LaCroix's outstretched hand returned to the podium as their applause peppered out. "The house knows Bruno as a father-figure. But to those who may only recently be making Mr. Giovanni's acquaintance, I, personally, am pleased to vouch for his character. In fact, I knew Bruno had a place with this organization from the day we met. _'Prince,'_ he said, _'I am relieved to finally talk seriously about pooling our resources. But I have to be honest. How can I know that the Camarilla is the right choice for our clan? We are quite different people, and haven't always been good neighbors.'_ All valid points. _'Well,'_ I told him. _'I am originally a Frenchman, and you are as Italian as Italian blood comes. So we do have one important thing in common.'_ " A pause; a two-beat punch-line. The Prince offered a small, self-depreciating smile. "We both think 'proletariat' is a type of cheese."

Oh, _no_.

There was immediate laughter. Mr. LaCroix was neither charming nor amusing—he could manufacture politeness when it suited him—but one thing was certain: you always laugh at a Prince's jokes. Pink candle resin speckled the perfect tablecloths. Ms. Woeburne did a good job not to groan.

"In seriousness." The Prince leant forward, and the humor snapped away. He was a senate whip over a room full of monochrome suits and luxuriant dress, and viewed them all as one singular unit. His voice was steady. S.W. imagined she was not alone in feeling its contempt. "I understand the circumstances under which we meet are exceptional. They may come as a surprise. Yet what is more surprising to me is that our factions have coexisted for so long without either extending a hand. In a changing Los Angeles, the time has come to move beyond antiquated treaties gathering dust in some Harpy's keep. We must, as is our nature, keep pace with the world. So, then. Let us do away with this unproductive silence; let us move beyond the deadlock, and hold ourselves above vague and hurtful rumors. Let us instead form a coalition that is as sustaining as our histories for what—I am sure—will be many years to come."

The reception was mixed. Giovanni heirs voiced various degrees of approval regardless of their private opinions, and a Camarilla sycophant is always ready to nod his chin, clap his hands. Primogen rose around Mr. LaCroix's waiting table; Ms. Woeburne stood, too, embarrassed at having been late about it, applauding loudly to apologize. Only the grand columns were a silent brigade.

Mr. LaCroix seemed content enough with himself; it was all in a night's work.

"Colleagues, with no further ado, please extend your welcome to the newest member of my cabinet." And the Prince stepped back from his post, swept one crisp sleeve offstage. It looked to be a premonition. "Ms. Mira Luciana Giovanni."

Bruno's face plummeted like a Golden Gate suicide.

When Mira trotted across up for her dues, grin sparkling and unsuppressed and threatening to splinter her cheeks, the Last World uncle changed. No one watched him. Their overshot don devolved in seconds, and in his seams, you could see the death beneath Italian cut and gold. Massive fists, white tufts scabbing fat fingers, clenched upon the back of his wooden chair. By the time that kitten-nosed niece stepped into Mr. LaCroix's handshake—she of corset laces, crimson stilettos, dramatic black shadow glittering from lid to brow beneath strident lights; he of old, straight lines—Bruno had lost something of himself. And yet you could do nothing to stop them, these Ventrue and these cousins. These young people are coming up to where you are.

You cannot stop it. You might derail one—you might push a young contender off the tracks—but you understand that there will always be another car. This is the way of the Jyhad. He could not beat it; he could only stall there, stripped callow of power by an ambitious, candy-faced girl. When her name hit open air, the old Giovanni had already been standing up.

Bruno's wife was late. This should have been his first clue. Although he did not know it yet, three Mercedes full of senior loyalists were currently leaking through their bullet-ridden windows and onto the moist black asphalt of State Route 110; one of them wore a pink suit jacket; the murky stuff inside her head crept out, glued to that curt blonde bob.

Mira decided, after drinking a bottle and snapping a few of Uncle's best cigars, it would be safer this way. Severene was too smart with that ring on her finger. She had to go. At Bruno's table, Aunt Ita was wearing white lace; she deer-eyed at him with his Childe on that stage; and, when it was done, and when it was obvious, Ita stood up. She clapped with long cream sleeves. The spill of her nightbird hair looking forward as he left was the clearest memory of what happened in this house on the first of a hot September.

Mira embraced Sebastian's outstretched palm with the enthusiasm of a junior partner. They smiled theatrically at one another, but S.W. could see the former's expression was genuine. "Thank you, Prince," she announced to the crowd, a Cheshire twist of lip gloss and that broad, lovely Giovanni nose. She was thrilled. Her catlike face beamed. "And thanks so much to you, my dear family and friends. Firstly, I would like to say how fortunate, how grateful, and how truly privileged I am to accept this alliance. What we're seeing here tonight is an amazing opportunity. Cousins, I promise you not to squander a moment of my service to the Camarilla Court. New partners, I know we have a prosperous future ahead of us. Mr. LaCroix has been an incredible mentor and I am deeply honored to hold a position on his committee. I believe in the Prince's vision for a better Los Angeles and I will do everything within my power to help him achieve this vision."

So she was not a very good speaker. Ms. Woeburne was perceptive enough to notice that, throughout this celebration, Prince LA kept one hand firmly upon the pulpit.

However weak and offhand the speech, Mira won her ovation, and she'd won it hard. She stared at Bruno as though he were a plump, fat-necked grill pig in a charcoal suit. The look between them lasted a thousand years. These looks do. Even when the eye contact was done, that look somehow remained. It seared as the young Giovanni shook Prince LA's hand again and they dismounted the stage. It began to curl as Mr. LaCroix—having almost forgotten his manners—double-took midway down the stairs, turning back to offer Mira one arm. His courtesy was a gesture of showmanship to which she said yes. An usurper faked daintiness on her tall shoes.

Bruno had vanished before they were flat on the floor. Two panicked Rosselinis also disappeared, leaving the portholed door swinging into a kitchen full of ice. Ms. Woeburne doubted anyone would ever see them again.

The ugliness was over, and in the world of the ruling class, this means the party goes on.

It usually does. Ms. Woeburne can tell you that. Why wouldn't it; there is always enough luxe at the tippy-top to go around. The socialites recover their pleasure. They fill a summer night with inane and ostentatious chatter, clinking crystal, the aftertaste of coups. There is no silverware to speak of and the napkins are origami starfish, pale swirls of honeydew green. Silk curtains and black furniture, a funeral. Too much white makes the air crisp and unfriendly. Stony, yes; ice bags, reflections in floor polish, the musk of this cup in her hand. It smells like pineapples in here, she thinks—like papaya, like palm leaves, like smoke—a fork of the Mediterranean, of paprika, of the armored ships that once brought cases of them home.

A small ensemble entered tightly on LaCroix's heels, already off-schedule and struggling to set up equipment. Their shuffling grated everyone until an alto saxophone replaced it; tinny, unemotive, but technically precise. Joelle would come scurrying out in short order. It annoyed the Foreman, but do you know what? _C'est la vie._ Let the scarlet chanteuse ponder that thimbleful of cultural wisdom; the mockery would not be lost upon her; close to nothing is, not on Joelle.

Not about to be beaten by the Primogen a second time, Ms. Woeburne stood like a slingshot soldier when the Prince returned. He sat coolly beside her at one hemisphere of their hefty round table; Mira occupied a chair at his left, sadistic festivity, while S.W. held fort in the right. She swept a nervous hand across her inflexible hair and scooped the gown so that it would not crumble or ride.

No longer center-stage and not at all sad about it, Mr. LaCroix picked up his champagne glass, upsetting the blood inside with one ambivalent swirl. He hoisted a casual toast in the exuberant, chittering Ms. Giovanni's direction; then he leaned back, let her take the next speech, and didn't bother drinking. His eyes looked tired. His ivory sleeves matched the table-spread.

"Well," Mr. LaCroix said to Ms. Woeburne, smiling emptily at Mira all the while. "That's over with."

S.W.'s eyebrow quirked. She touched one finger to the mouth of her goblet and murmured back: "The debutantes wearing on you, sir?"

Prince LA's taut look twitched into something that looked like a smirk—an unkind and self-serving expression—but what she'd said had been true enough to be funny. "I always did say you were clever, Ms. Woeburne." His sarcasm was obvious, but perhaps not totally meant.

"That and subtle." She tapped her index on the glass lip, bit the inside of one over-rouged cheek. You could feel a draft quiver along the floor, and it tickled her toes, made the pores rise. "At least I can help you smile-and-nod. Roll a few toasts. Pat a few hands. Graciousness and what-else—they'll have something to talk about for a year or two. It's a good time. It's a hell of a pageant. Sir."

"Believe me. You have no idea," he promised her. Ms. Woeburne did not like the way he'd said it, and no, she imagined she did not.

"Although I have the fullest confidence you will," came soon—not soon enough to save her the uneasiness of a Sire implying something, word games like the drawing of a feather down the back of your neck. "Someday. Preferably not for a decade or two."

"I imagine I'll need more than a decade. A good eon, at least." S.W. pursed at her own expense. "That, or an army. A blitzkrieg."

She harrumphed. The Prince drank. They'd been served a decent vintage, not remarkable. Mr. LaCroix didn't care for it, and with newfound disrespect for the Giovanni taste, put his cup back down. "You're being funny. It's not a crime to be, but don't kid yourself for a joke; you could stand to learn a great deal here. In overtures like this one, a diplomat has to cajole without catering too much. The American sharks can be hard to sedate."

Someone please help her; Ms. Woeburne bit her tongue not to blurt out: _"And this audience is totally dead!"_

"Yes," she said, and lifted the starfish, collapsing it, dabbing a clean corner of her upper lip. "Yes, they are."

It wasn't much later that Joelle made her way in, not half as flittering or contemptuous as she typically was. Lefevre strode—it was the only word for how she moved—onstage: long-striding hips and raspberry lips, the butterscotch twist of her hair wound back into pearls like something flamenco, like she finally fell into her element, and the whole thing snapped of cardamom. The Toreador was overblown, eye-catching, grandiose. Dramatic chiffon over every slope of that dramatic frame, five feet and ten inches of it; the train curtained her coral heels; the cut was dangerously backless, shoulders ruffled, wingspan wide. And, of course, every stitch was flowering carmine. Ms. Woeburne found it ridiculous. But then again, Ms. Woeburne found most everything to do with Venture Tower's second-choice to be ridiculous. Even when it wasn't. That's just the way she needed it to be.

Nobody said a thing about her own dress or the way she fit into it, just to be clear. An insignificant thing, but one S.W. noticed after clapping a grand total of two times for the scarlet snake that had chided her, so easily, not to show up in a suit.

"It was Joelle, by the way," Mr. LaCroix noted then—a terrible thing to say to such a conceited soldier—ringing blood around his chalice—a terrible gesture to make. Both Ventrue had been watching the pretty creature with a sort of amused resentment. "Ms. Joelle," he repeated, bored and sidelong as Lefevre touched a corkscrew curl of caramel. "Who hoisted the red flag on you."

The green of Ms. Woeburne's stare was woody confusion, then biblical anger, then lustrous, hateful alarm.

That bitch. It hit her like lightning. Prying, fluffed-up, bothersome waste of four pointed teeth and a pint of blood. She must have sniffed something strange about S.W.'s data morgue check-ins; she must've followed her, found the right computer, tracked down the recently opened files and guessed. The thought of being routed by that flouncing fashion rack was mortifying. It smacked her cheek once, then gave it another whack, other-side, new angle. A Foreman ought to be religious about dusting over her shoe prints, deleting her holdovers, securing herself. She'd told Rodriguez it was an unreasonable timeframe—that three days makes for reckless investigations, slipshod service. It does not matter. A Foreman must be careful to be sure.

 _'And that dirty little lapdog turned me in without a word, without a question, without an 'excuse me, dear friend?' Bitch,'_ she thought again. _'Nasty, conniving bitch.'_ Never mind that you'd not be smart to dear-friend a potential defector. Never mind company policies or intelligence threats or how likely Ventrue corruption is—corruption of the same kind they witnessed here tonight, preening in the riggings, seeping in through the cathedral cracks. Lefevre was not like Ms. Woeburne. She had no business trying to be a gear in this machine. You should not point fingers, Joelle, unless you are willing to have the knuckle taken off.

The implications were worse, still—possibilities so horrid they could barely be faced, sitting handsomely at Los Angeles's A-list table, napkin in her fist. God, was Joelle _cunning_? Was Joelle not so second, not so scenery, not so back-place? Was Joelle not, in fact, the incompetent creampuff she acted?

If Lefevre was not lowest, and there were two in LA—a minuteman and a _maitre d'—_ then who is the second-choice child?

Ms. Woeburne sat with the cup in her hand and her good time went to something like rocks.

Mr. LaCroix watched his better spy with faraway disinterest. He was not looking at ours. "Perhaps I shouldn't be so hard on her. She's served me well, and service is what matters most in this court. Merit is the important count." That said, the Prince switched his gaze from preening Toreador peacock to edgy blueblood fishing-bird. Clan Ventrue is a member of the crow family. Mira, crow herself, gabbed cheerfully with Claudia Fairholm across their desert of a tabletop, face alight, gestures elated, graduating to a bigger class of fish.

"I have no idea what to say to you," Ms. Woeburne admitted; that was it. Her fingers and belly and toes felt like the bitterness in her cup.

"I imagine you don't. But there's no need to pussyfoot. I was not impressed with your failure to confide in me, but your decisiveness in adversity is something I find admirable about you. It is familiar, in a way," LaCroix disclosed, considering this visibly, a crease in the plane of his brow. "And it's true: we didn't need Carroll. He was unscrupulous, to say the least, and his uses were wearing thin. I don't appreciate what you did. But one might say, in this case, all's well that ends well."

He smiled at her. She managed one back, though the pipes behind the teeth were shut.

Have you seen a dog, thrown to its back, bear a snarl? Ms. Woeburne isn't a misbehaving Brittany with a belly full of pheasant, and Ventrue aren't canine; they are leo, vipera, something large, something else. But there are times in which a big predator feels threatened where it will put forth all its parts for the sake of looking small.

"I will have to think on a punishment, of course," he went on. S.W.'s stomach was like a living carp, feeling greasy and just a little bit yellow at the edge. "While I'm entitled to show you some measure of preference, I cannot exempt you from discipline. Don't worry. Nothing too dire. I'll find a community service project for you. We'll get you an unpleasant job."

As quickly as the fishy nausea had come, it was undermined by the hopeful lemon-bake aftertaste of relief. An understatement; it was likely to be _very_ unpleasant work; but it was not a demotion and it was not a horsewhip, and she embraced that with a puff of air going out. "I understand. I deserve it," Ms. Woeburne lied. "And I am sorry." (This was not a lie.) "I know everyone says that, but I really am. The Hollywood situation—you made it very clear. There was—well. I tried to handle it. It was wrong of me to assume. Arrogant, is what I should say. But I did what I thought was the best thing I could."

It was a bizarrely genuine admission of guilt. She hadn't meant it to be, but these words brought a persistent, prickle-pear sensation below the Foreman's collarbone. "I hate working behind your back," Ms. Woeburne said, and she found that, too, was not a lie.

The Prince's expression narrowed—and she blinked helplessly as the he stopped, and chuckled, and you could see all the curved boxes of teeth. "Dear girl." Little lives are like cotton seeds under an unperturbed old Ventrue's stare. "You are never 'behind my back,' I promise you."

What could Ms. Woeburne do—but ball her hands, bow her head, and nod _yessir_.

"Stop moping. I forgave you," LaCroix tossed in, smarting her forearm with his palm. The simple, unprecedented tap was out-of-character, and it startled her. Dear-girl grasped her arm above where he'd struck by reflex, disturbed by being treated kindly, like a fellow or a real protégé. She felt as though something had still gone wrong.

"I'm sorry?" she tried, still clutching her own naked elbow. "I mean: I am sorry. But I wasn't going for moping. I didn't want—"

"I was angry with you," he guessed, not what Ms. Woeburne was going to say. "But I've had time to reflect on the steps you took, and the motives behind those few poor decisions you made. It closed well enough. I've made some important arrangements, and you? You have my pardon. Because I know you did that incredibly stupid thing not for self-interest, but out of some misguided desire to protect me. I demand loyalty from my officers. I expect excellence. But I am actually rather touched by the dangers in which you placed yourself when under the presumption my seat was in jeopardy. As you said, it was an arrogant presumption. Not at all smart, but parts of the episode are somewhat commendable. Though I am by no means applauding you, it was endearing, in a way. Do you see my meaning?"

 _Endearing?_ Scrambling for life-and-limb at an Anarch chief's behest was—is that the right word? Is that the three-syllable sneer? Now Ms. Woeburne was getting a little angry. Would it have been half so endearing, the Foreman wondered, if Nines Rodriguez had sent her sloshing back to Sebastian with nothing but a bag full of I'm-Sorry? Would a tour of civil service suffice had she'd failed to follow through? Would 'endearing' or 'commendable' be appropriate descriptions of her after the Camarilla drew its recompense?

No, she thought: _dead_ would probably be much closer to that what-if.

"Did you learn something about Jyhad, at least?" he wondered, and did so with what seemed to be honest, albeit mild, curiosity. She was still guarding that bare flesh where he'd touched her. Her trapezius had clenched up and, for no apparent reason, it hurt.

Ms. Woeburne harrumphed—a weak, rueful answer—because it was all she could muster surrounded by wealth and defined by missing her shot. "Yes. I'm rubbish at it."

"Plenty of time to cut your teeth, miss."

And that was all he had to say on the subject, glancing across the room to acknowledge a fastidious clanmate S.W. did not recognize.

She frowned hard at her wineglass.

Surprising how harshly the bailiff took that one. Surprising the difference one _s_ on a Ms. makes.

"Enough for the moment; it's a conversation we'll finish later. This is a party. We may as well try to be in the spirit," was Mr. LaCroix's suggestion. He reclined against his chair. "Let's see if we can't brighten things. I have one or two reasons to celebrate, don't I? My treaties and my plans are all lined up. And you, misguided or not, played a role in both of them."

"Your Giovanni alliance does seem to have carried through without a hitch." S.W. listened distractedly to Mira, Primogen Fairholm, and Primogen Greene gossip fruitlessly. The three women looked like a dinner-theater rendition of Macbeth's weird sisters. Ms. Woeburne did not want to guess at what she and her Prince looked like in their corner, plotting quietly, harsh and clannish eyes. "I'd wager a bet that your representative is performing up to speed in Santa Monica. Did you decide on Mr. Chen?" (She imagined that fulsome ancilla firing up a PowerPoint for the baffled Anarch coterie. It was a funny daydream. Her bracelet went _clack_ as she reached for another drink; she fiddled an unelaborate ring upon her thumb.)

The Prince's smile was quiet and small. His eyelids lowered, half-moon slices, incomplete white, black, blue. "Not quite."

"Oh. Ms. Sengupta, then."

"Ms. Sengupta is a fine negotiator, of course, but no." The Ventrue's grin—always a sinister, collected thing when Ventrue grin—inched on. It belonged on an Aesop Fable fox. "Venture another guess."

"I hate guessing. Please just tell me," Ms. Woeburne asked, submissively showing her inherited pair of teeth. It was a halfhearted attempt at being endearing, this one—but Mr. LaCroix seemed to appreciate the effort, if not the result. Such was true of other things about her, too.

"Let me tell you a secret about winning this game. I've said a lot about partners and partnerships tonight. But I am saying this to you: there is no such thing as genuine alliance," a Prince promised, glancing at his radiant collaborator. This mansion air was oppressive with the commingled scents of several generations. He watched Mira Giovanni like one might a bubbling pup whose novelty would soon wear off. "They are all of convenience, and they all will live only as long as they continue to be convenient. No treaty—no matter how badly needed, no matter how well-written, no matter how much it is meant at the time—outweighs instinct, and you know what our first one is. The trick to succeeding in this life is predicting how long your ally's convenience will last, and when the timer runs dry, preempting them with an adder in the basket. Remember what I'm telling you tonight in a year or two. When a real decision is at your feet, remember who told you that. Remember this, too: _You_ are the sole proponent of your goals, and that is the way it always is. Losses and gains may be made by those in your circles, and perhaps at your expense, but they are your secondary concern. They are transient, and they are temporary. Persist in this world long enough, and you'll see what I mean; when we play our enemies against our enemies, your victor is guaranteed."

He laughed—grandly—and clinked their glasses like business cohorts of the worst white-collar kind. "The coalition of You and I."

"So you sent a Giovanni?" Ms. Woeburne asked, taking a sip. Joelle, hands folded virginally over her sternum, opened sixty seconds ahead of schedule with _Tombé du Ciel_.

The Prince leant closer, and gave a better answer into the shell of her ear. "I sent Grünfeld Bach."

Color sluiced from the corporal's face.

"Cheers to you, Ms. Woeburne," Sebastian toasted her, and he drank.

 

**III.**

 

Somewhere during the next half-hour, S.W. politely excused herself, made mercenary haste for an empty washroom, and then she was locked in the shower with cell phone pressed between shoulder and chin.

The Ventrue was terribly calm with her back to the tile, the receiver to her ear. She did not move, shake, second-guess, or breathe. There would have been no point of any of that. Instead, she listed for footsteps outside, for car wheels on gravel, mostly for a dial tone. Eight tolls now, no sign of an answer. It had been her third time calling.

"Mr. Rodriguez, this is Ms. Woeburne with the LaCroix Foundation," Ms. Woeburne with the LaCroix Foundation fumbled automatically, an impersonal message for a frightfully impersonal person. The Foreman sounded collected and cool. . "An emergency situation has come to my attention. Listen carefully. Do NOT go to Santa Monica tonight. If you are already on your way, please turn around and disregard our arrangement. Call me back IMMEDIATELY."

That said, she clicked off her phone, hollered _fuck,_ and punched one palm heel into the shower door.

Glass rattled. Cracks bloomed around her hand, and the Ventrue wrenched back, still cussing, lacerations already wet. "Shit," she spat, wiped a streak of blood onto her dress., then said it again. Ms. Woeburne stumbled out of the stall and twisted on its faucet. There was little she could about a splintered door, but at least the DNA could be washed. She watched hers commingle with water, trickle down the pane and run clear.

She was groping for control. She was failing. She knew she was failing, imagination swarmed with the measle-mark flicks of targeting lasers on sternum, gut, skull. Her throat contracted. One of the woman's hands pressed forward against sliding-glass, posture hunched, stomach hurting. She felt like pleading her innocence, or for her life.

He had seemed so lackadaisical. A clink of the glass, a punishment warning, the echo of those Society coordinates she slapped on his desk, a shrug that now screamed sense. He was blithe about it.

Ms. Woeburne didn't presently have the leisure. She hardly had time to squeeze the smear out of her gown, bent there in a manor washroom full of linens, pink tile, and seashell soaps.

It seemed unjust, somewhere down there under the panicking _thoom-thoom_ her mind still insisted her blood made through her chest. She couldn't appreciate the strategy or the chessboard or the accident. She couldn't even whip her head back and enjoy a dastardly ho-ho-ho at a Baron's demise. No, the unfortunate fact was that all this had left Ms. Woeburne in a rather horrible lurch.

"Lurch," you know, like the Anarch bull's-eye glaring into her head.

She wasn't being entirely honest with you, calling tonight an accident. It is not, broken down, an accident. It is a plan. All according to plan—just not hers. A Prince's plan, an aggressor's plan, and a plan that can be tidied up by snipping the ropes and dropping it all at the doorstep of your disappointing second-choice childe.

An unpleasant job: Toss up a carton, point your finger at a soldier, and let the eggs smash on her feet.

 _She did it,_ he was going to say. He'd tell them it was S. Woeburne who spoiled the compact with her bad politics and her vindictive, hold-fast mind. She laid the bait for Leopold; she was the corroded link; she is the one who wore a lord's banner, carried a gavel, and played a game of Murder in the Dark. And she might—in better circumstances, in a different country—have been alive to deny it.

There are nights, in this West, where it all seems to glisten. They powerful count silver dollars, wear blue jewels in their hair, toast with wine glasses in a room that smells of passion fruit and brandy. There are nights of ennui and blacktop and nothing. And there are some nights, of course, where you may do any number of these things—where it may be gunpowder or it may be parties—but, at the end of the evening, when you are pulling off your diamonds and oiling your gat, you open your basket, and there is the adder, waiting for you.

This is what happens when you irritate a Prince. This is what happens when you march imperfectly in a Ventrue line.

"Shit," she told herself again, knowing it was pointless, needing the hardness of the word. "Shit, shit, shit."

A decent Childe ought to love their Sire. Ms. Woeburne supposed she did, in a way—a way he would've tolerated, at least. To be just so frank, though, she did not love Sebastian LaCroix enough to have her brains jackhammered out by a cult of weepy Free-State kamikazes with pipe bombs and carving knives.

She had to come up with a lie.

Ms. Woeburne had to conjure a story; she needed some credible reason; an excuse that didn't seem completely insane; and, above all, one that did not end with the word "Prince." How to explain that lie to Mr. LaCroix afterwards (presuming there _was_ an afterwards) couldn't be worried about right now. One task at a time, she knew. One step to the next. Getting tangled in your own web—this is the way most Ventrue die. _Left-foot-right-foot._ That's what Good People do.

Do you find it unfair to protect those who do not protect you? You're not cut-out for the Camarilla, then; she is sorry to tell you; she's not happy to be the one.

Maybe they hadn't left, the Foreman soothed herself. Maybe they were all still there.

Her clipped fingernails felt heavy; does that make sense? Her bones, not broken, gripped hard.

Ms. Woeburne turned off the phone, stepped outside the guest bathroom, and looked around.

She was alone in this dim hallway, short heels on a long white rug. The Foreman softly shut the door behind her and descended two carpeted flights of stairs. She did not stop to speak with anyone. Even when Therese, who'd slunk into the back foyer for a cigarette, shot Prince LaCroix's representative a mandatory nod, S.W. blew by. Her pace was icy and executive as the Ventrue slid through a staff door and outside into the Giovanni Mansion's empty rear yard.

Their grass was fresh and perfect. These places always are.

Late summer dark took suburbia in coarse black brushstrokes. It saturated these moneyed hills where they turned in their sleep, blinking lazily over downtown; the humidity made yard lights misty yellow against the marble. Things Giovanni are romantic in that sanguine way. Ms. Woeburne had become inured to it, though—to the towering brand of beauty, the kind that builds skyscrapers and galleons with fresh white sails—and she saw, above all else, stillness. She filled her lungs with the moist air and assessed.

The lot stretched out wide; there were the pebbled paths, like fat snakes in short, dense grass; there was the asphalt driveway, surrounded by Astroturf; lime trees and white hydrangeas made plump rows of cream and sour fruit beneath a harvest moon. It hadn't been intended as a party garden. It was clean, uninhabited and massive—an open space that made S.W. feel queasy for the way her limbs glowed around a dress you could not see in this darkness.

She looked for red ties on large men or for faces in black windows, peeking through curtain lace. No one was around. If she looked far—past the bright stone around her, through the leaf-eaten latticework of archways and pillars, towards the flank of this house—Ms. Woeburne could see cars on a curt service road. Catering trucks and carriers were parked along a modest cul-de-sac. Nearby, Italian busts twined in rock like solid milk. Walk straight, turn left down a chute of iceberg roses, and you'd see the appealing glean of chlorine in a wading fountain, unused and childless. Sprinklers _chuk-chuk-chuked_. It made her shiver. All of it did, or maybe it was only the air—too wet, too oceanic. Wind rippled the prongs of palm trees and dew dabbled the Ventrue's stockingless toes as she strode coolly off the back walkway and onto those first blades of flawless grass.

The clicking of her flat-faced shoes was frightening as they transitioned from the crumbled stone to earth and back. All these yard lights against all this cement might've intimidated her if she was not, you know, herself. They tossed up wicked silhouettes of Ms. Woeburne as she walked, drawing her in cinematic, mirror-maze tilts. She followed that road for a short time, feeling like something that could be hunted. She made herself ignore it, made herself plan, until she could make up her mind.

The Foreman decided on one stout, four-tire freeze-truck with deep treads and a meat-locker. It had ferried in drinks all evening, and she was sure, with some imagination, it could ferry her out. The chassis was bulky. You could probably shoot it a few times and keep the groceries fresh.

It would do.

There was only one ghoul standing at the end of that lane, an uzi at his belt, a book in his hand, a suit trying hard to be formal. She Dominated him into a covered Jacuzzi. A keyring jangled on his belt loop. He stepped slowly into the sinking black tarp.

Four, five, eight tries until she found the right candidate, and the driver's lock turned. Ms. Woeburne checked her new van's loading doors, and then returned to the swimming man, wondering if she'd enough strength to pull him in. It wasn't likely and wasn't worth the struggle. Instead, she fished him over with a bug-scooper, pulled out his sadly sopping gun for herself, and poled him under—right down to the bottom of that lurid, lukewarm water in the smart, square pool.

As it happened, there was a color-coded swipe-card in the boy's checkered vest. It matched, just by coincidence, the sign on the guardroom standing fifty yards away.

She went inside.

Inside: spare cameras, security monitors, two Coca-Cola cans, a _Maxim Magazine_ , and about six crates of military ordnance.

Ms. Woeburne grabbed four shotguns, two of the munitions tubs, a flashlight, some number of loose bullet cartons, a tough black windbreaker she shrugged on, and maybe two or three rifles. She was in a rush; she wasn't exactly sure.

Then she dumped them all into the back of the truck, and she plopped herself in.

It was uncomfortably warm. Her arms had to reach quite a ways for the wheel in this low, awkward cockpit; there was no adjustment knob or seatbelt slider. There was a vague smell of the type of cigar she didn't like, a crack in one rearview. Dashboard meters made bare skin look an alien blue. The Foreman placed the balls of her feet on the pedals and exhaled.

Could she skirt disaster? Honestly, Ms. Woeburne didn't know. But just in case the answer was 'not a chance,' she had better show up prepared.

Preparing, do you know, is the Ventrue thing to do.

 

**IV.**

 

After showing up at this lame-duck Camarilla thing—a five-man complement behind him—to step out on a street and spring open a bear trap, there were still a few truths Nines Rodriguez expected of the Ceasefire Meeting at Santa Monica Pier:

  1. It would not be worth the gas it took to drive here. (True.)
  2. The Society of Leopold in no way realized what they were doing or what they were doing it to. (True.)
  3. Ms. Woeburne wouldn't come speeding up the boardwalk in an ice truck and lay the whole thing flat roundabout twenty feet from where he was crouched behind a worthless goddamn popcorn stand.



False.

"JESUS CHRIST," she screamed where she fell on the pavement, vehicle hurtling past her, collapsing in a great big action-hero boom.

Nines wasn't going to be too hard on himself. Two-out-of-three is a pretty good guess.

To be really, completely honest, right off the bat: it was probably what you'd call "last ditch tactics." Ms. Woeburne, though. Ms. Woeburne—who'd been too small to stiff-lip through the Blitz, but remembered the smiling sadness of duck-and-cover, of gas mask mothers, of Red Menace—had tallied her fallout options, and come up with nothing else. She'd looked for better ideas, but none appeared to her. And so she made that aggressive decision, calculated between those final few yards of asphalt, chainlink, and safety rail—and yes, it was definitely _last ditch_ judging from how hard S.W. stomped the pedal, and how hard she tried not to imagine her insides painting the windshield glass.

Well, the Ventrue have never been much for imagination—but Ms. Woeburne, you know, is an extraordinary pessimist. She'd done nothing but pessimism since stepping outside the gala and turning off that new-paint road.

' _Try this on for bipartisan, you sons-of-bitches,'_ she'd dared, drew some slapdash geometrics between where her van was and where she wanted it to be, then slammed brakes-to-floorboard and upturned the automobile in a roaring runway of disaster.

You might call her a coward in many ways, Ms. Woeburne. She will not face herself and she will not take the blinders off. She will not take responsibility for it. But while she might be a coward—and she might be a stooge—and she might miss the point of her conscience—and, yes, she might be hiding scales under her clothes—don't you dare say she lacks the guts.

So Ms. Woeburne had punched the gas, forked open the passenger door, strengthened her nerves, and leapt out of the truck about five seconds before collision.

Alloy-on-asphalt makes a horrible squall. The sheer heat of that pier was overwhelming when she hit it—forearms first, twisting to shoulders, wrapping along the concrete stomach-to-back. It hurt. But the Foreman had expected hurt; she'd readied for the impact as much as she could, tightened her core and loosened her joints, hoped the lock-pieces of her neck would fare well. It was an awfully risky thing to do, but whatever ditch you're at and however much it stings, it's leagues easier to protect your body against the unkindness of blacktop than the letter of law. That should be obvious. That, she would think, is clear.

It was pretty impressive, you have to admit.

Woeburne retracted her elbows to her navel, pressed both legs together; she hugged her limbs tightly to her torso; she tucked both shoulders protectively around the cradle of her head and her throat. None of that careful planning registered as the Foreman rolled rapidly head-over-heels to a stop. Leopold fired immediately; elephant-sized bullets stippled engine pipes, shook tin. Her van was riddled within seconds. It was a metal corpse, no longer salvageable. Yet—oddly enough, and for all that—the Ventrue's parting oh-shit before jumping away from her crash-course car was _the road rash will ruin my dress_.

The truck whirled to a standstill mid-field, nose bleeding steam, pressure shattering its glass. It was nowhere near close enough to damage the hunters. It did, however—as per Ms. Woeburne's hasty mathematics—swing a wide arc, trip over two potholes, and fall roundabout where there was dire need of cover. Spouting fluid, motor totaled, the van had second life: it blocked a gap of open asphalt between the sad little vendor's square where LA's Anarch Party holed itself up and a nearby three-story arcade. She'd seen the problem blocks away. Empty space will trap a soldier at a low disadvantage, keep them tails-tucked and returning fire in short, ineffective bursts.

You know what you do with a peep-hole? You pull out your tape and you cover it up.

I mean: if she couldn't do that, what good is a corporal for?

When the kinetics finally tumbled out, leaving her stinging there on old blacktop, there was a blip in the radar, a moment of deafness. This is the exact moment in which S.W. jerked up her head—absinthe eyes spiraling riotously, irony wasted—and announced that very sincere _Jesus Christ_.

Ms. Woeburne's arms were already scabbing. Grime and friction burn, significant scrapes out of her clothing, a torn sleeve off a jacket, the look on her face. The Ventrue's hair, coffee-brown at its nape with something that could not have been sweat, went feral. Both her shins bled beneath the velvet. She was fairly sure everything should've been hurting too badly to move by now—a nervous system's way of shrieking _what in the hell did you do_ —but adrenaline smothered it. So S.W. was up on the concrete and running; pebbles and broken aluminum flew beneath her. She did not slow down or stop. By the time she reached the barricade of that dead truck, ammunition was sailing overhead, around, wherever Leopold could reach. Shots thumped loudly into the chassis. Things burst. It was a terribly disorienting thing.

Ms. Woeburne pressed her spine on the belly of the vehicle, between the axles, knees gummy, feeling a vestigial need to pant. Tires still spun on either side. All of these scrapes were just beginning to sear as the trapped Anarchs darted out from behind their slumping cordon, slinking along a train of automobiles like big, skittish hunting cats, and towards her.

"It wasn't me," she blurted before Rodriguez could let loose a first in the crude oil of her blue-black heart.

If you'll lend her a minute—if you'll just give her permission to make what is bound to be an awful cliché—the Brujah looked like a dead man, somebody made of pieces wrenched together, dragged through dirt, still walking. Shells had put frightening, fleshy dents into thick leather of his jacket, red rising through bullet-proof that hadn't held. She wasn't sure if it was a fortunate or discouraging thing he had come prepared for being shot. One knee had been torn out of the Baron's jeans, bleeding into ragged denim; the dust of old cement smudged it, an impression of bone. It was difficult to gauge an intent as he approached her—stormed right up—but at a closer advantage, she could see breakage, a splintering at the edges of a body. Machinegun blue roiled insurrection in bruised eye sockets; the left had swollen murky purple. There was a large vertical cut leaking through the dark hair at his temple and halfway down the right cheek. It looked as though he'd smacked his head.

Ms. Woeburne adds that she might've felt more sympathy had he not been growling at her like a junkyard fucking dog.

The Brujah was moving towards her rather quickly, now that she noticed—unacceptably quickly—much _too_ quickly, actually, and before she knew it or meant to, the Ventrue was backpedaling, face vacant, wishing very suddenly but very strongly she had followed her first _Plan A_.

"No—no, no—let-me-explain—" But it was difficult to do so with the Baron's hand clamped around her throat.

In a bodily whorl of movement, S.W. was hoisted up up by the hinge of her neck like a timber snake, and she was thrown roughly against the vehicle's underside, and then it _all_ hurt. Lightning webbed through the coils of her brain. Protrusions gouged her lower back. The breath woofed out of her lungs, something she couldn't retain; his palm heel ground into her juggling larynx; her nails retaliated for leeway. They dug deep but were unable to pry him off. Rattlers, cottonmouths, crawling things with venom glands; a thumb and forefingers squeezed the tender lymph nodes under Ms. Woeburne's jaw. And it was reflex, instinctive reaction, but the Ventrue's fangs flared through their gums. Brave violence. They could not compare to the weight or size of Brujah teeth, and serpents take wolves only when trod on—when they creep, unseen, into the den.

Ms. Woeburne did not want the fight. She tried to rip her head away, but could not, watching muzzle-flash chase moonlight down murderous enamel. There was a fifty-millimeter in his opposite hand. S.W., excuses and air depleted, waited for the sickly vertebrae _pop._

 _"_ Mistake _. Mistake."_ That's how she spent the air she had left, and something she'd warned him other times before.

The Baron said nothing. She wasn't sure how he thought to get an explanation; Kindred don't need to respirate, but vocal chords do. The Foreman wedged a bent leg between her abdomen and her attacker, searching blindly for leverage to pare free. No chance; Rodriguez's handhold was bearlike. Buckshot started steaming somewhere behind her. The Brujah's shoulders heaved up and down as he very obviously pondered hurling her into crossfire.

She couldn't get free, but she did get a gasp; blood blossoms welled through the raw lines her nails cut into knuckles, fingers, wrist.

"I said—" The squeal wretched into a gurgle. Claws punctured the fleshy hinge of his hand. "I SAID THIS ISN'T US."

"SHUT UP," he thundered, whipping the Ventrue's skull back, right into a ridge. Stars novad across her field of vision. She cursed _fuck_ , _son-of_ ; the poison didn't go anywhere. "The only reason you don't have a pistol rammed down your motherfucking windpipe is because I can't spare the ammunition. I figured you people'd try some shit like this, but hunters? I expect a meeting, I give you my attention, and you sick hunters on me? Fuck the Masquerade; you got Anarchs to kill. You got a fucking deadline to make. Well, you better say your mea culpas, bitch, because you are about to get—"

"I didn't know," the Foreman thundered right back, or meant to, but her voice came out an ugly, swollen wail. She'd gotten some fingers under his and jimmied them enough to spit a couple sentences out. "I didn't do this. I didn't send them. We did not know."

It was not immediately clear to Nines whether the Ventrue was referring to herself and Sire collectively, or had simply reverted to the Royal We _._ And honestly, it probably wouldn'tve mattered much to his overall decision of whether or not Ms. Woeburne needed her gray matter bashed out all over the ass-end of this car.

"Who, then?" he roared, and she stuttered another mouthful of nonsensical hates at being hefted up, slammed back.

"We did not know. I didn't—"

"I WILL KILL YOU RIGHT HERE. WHO."

Panic blistered. She pawed against his hand, couldn't get under it any further. Her eyes went unfocused and wide. "NOT ME."

"BULLSHIT," he fumed. There were scratches she put all over his arm. "You arranged this. I bet it was you the whole fucking time. Bet this shit has got nothing to do with him at all; you've wanted to take a swing at me, blueblood, and you took it. And you're going to fucking get it. I should take the tongue right out of your mouth. I should rip your fucking head off."

"LET GO," she yelled, ramming her foot into the Anarch's liver. He felt the impact but was too angry to feel the pain. They fought gawkily for a minute—limbs, scrambling, a faceful of elbow. Woeburne stomped her sandal on his knee and both of them went lopsidedly down.

"Stop this; stop; stop it," the Ventrue clamored, hoarse, groping for something to stab with. Her back was on the ground; her heels scrambled in; she'd belted him one in the side of the neck when his leg buckled, but Rodriguez still had her by the throat. He was cussing about the fall—had hit his hip, landing beside her, where her first reflex was to kick the Anarch again. This one hadn't managed enough extension to hurt. It was as if the Baron thought she'd sink her teeth the second he let her go, what mambas do. Woeburne corkscrewed, tried to worm out. Anarchs were running amuck behind them; two, three, or was that the same one? She could not see them and she could not care. "Let me up. Let me go."

The Brujah's fist was splotchy with his own blood and her shoe sole flashed with it, too; she'd stepped on Nines's skinned knee. She tried to reach his face with her fingers but couldn't. Something had stolen his attention—possibly a gunshot—and it infuriated her to be held here by a man who was looking away.

"Do as I say!" she scolded, because the foolishness was worse than the fear, and the fear was worse than this ache sloshing inside her head.

The Baron glared at her, and she felt reptilian—but before he could do as Ms. Woeburne said or disconnect the bones of her neck, something struck the left front wheel of that truck, and it erupted barely feet overhead. Rodriguez reacted. S.W. twisted free onto her stomach and then to her forearms, hands, knees.

"You son-of-a-bitch," she was coughing, grabbing at her clavicle, spitting, trying not to regurgitate, a heap of minor snake. "You stark-raving son-of-a-bitch. You could have fucking killed me! You could have broken my—"

"Why the fuck are you here?" Nines demanded. The arm he'd held her down with was shredded meat.

Woeburne resentfully massaged her collarbone back into commission. The Toreador she'd soon forget was Kent-Alan skittered past them and into the safety of that ruddy brickwork arcade. A large slab of cement lay just outside, what was probably supposed to be the start of an extension, but recession had left it incomplete. That yellow mane darted behind its protection and disappeared into the shop beneath the dead floor lights.

"To stop this," she rasped, insulted to have been posed such a stupid question. It felt like a branch fire below her chin where he'd grabbed on and held. Rodriguez had picked up the large pistol, but she didn't let that frighten her. The Ventrue crawled gingerly back towards the bulwark of automobile—toward the Anarch with the gun, a horrible direction—because there was nowhere else to go. "Obviously. Tried to stop it. Why would you ask me that; you know why I'm here. You told me you'd kill me. I thought I could," she made a false-start. She sat heavily with her back against the truck and she tried to remember what she was doing here and why. "I thought I could help."

Nines looked likely to start shouting again, but there was a lag in the fire. He climbed high enough to see over the truck and sent a few bullets back down the Pier. Right at that moment, the Baron looked like he was desperate enough to hand her a gun.

"But if you have it under control," she condescended. Pellets shattered a rearview mirror. The Ventrue's esophagus tingled; her expression was murderously alive and mottled with smeared lipstick.

"They bombed us," he told her.

Ms. Woeburne wished she had her glasses on. She always felt like she couldn't see.

"What?"

"Nail bombs," the Anarch hollered. And you could see now, if you looked closely, dime-sized dents in his dark coat, full of metal studs that did not belong. She was distracted by one—one hard pip, stuck deep in the bulletproof, nosed over the lung, smelling somehow like acid—and could not look away. "Bombed the shit out of us. We got here ten, fifteen minutes ago. Blew the glass in. Doug can hardly move. I got one in my thigh. Skelter's dead."

Here come the lies: "They must've—they must have intercepted our diplomat. They must've tapped my landlines. They hacked my telephone. I don't know. I'm not sure," she insisted, and the teeth around her tongue were beginning to chatter, something beneath her notice. "But we clearly can't stay out here. We need to keep this contained; we need to get all of these people out of the street and—"

Nines snorted. He ducked down and allowed a Kalashnikov burst to pass, then answered in two ear-splitting shots. One missed and broke a taillight on some ratty pickup Leopold was using for a barricade; the other splattered cerebrum, a terrible bloodflower pink, across its passenger window. "Shove it up your ass, Camarilla. _We_ -nothing. This is exactly what you bloodsuckers want. My lieutenant is _dead_. And they sent YOU, of all people, to pull our boots out of the fire? Bullshit," again. "You expect me to believe that? You expect me to believe anything you say, you got another thing coming, and I don't have the time to explain shit to you right now."

"I don't expect anything from you. I'm here," Woeburne heard herself swear. She pushed herself up against the truck. She stood. "Do you want my help?"

Something that sounded like a grenade seared down the Pier; it sent half a Honda husk over the rusted safety railing and into a black, choppy wave.

The silence that always follows explosions left Rodriguz staring white-eyed and Woeburne with both hands plastered over her mouth. They waited for more blasts.

None were forthcoming. In the lull, another pair of Brujah (these she didn't recognize) dashed past them and into the unlit complex. One was a middle-aged man padded in vaguely military green, limping badly, with a fisherman's beard and a spiderweb of dark tattoos. The other was a lean woman carting a sawed-off; she wore an ebony hairknot beneath a Harley helmet, layered in hide coats, so you could see only the skin of long hands. Rodriguez shoved her between the shoulder-blades when she stopped to ask what was happening, said _Christie move the fuck on_ , said _honey I don't have the time._

Feeling very naked without a gun of her own, Ms. Woeburne hand-crawled her way along the truck belly for support, heading for the freezer while Christie ran into cover and Rodriguez emptied another five, six, seven bullets. Now or never, the Foreman supposed, snapping the keyring from the bra strap she'd hooked it on.

One tug released the contents. AR-15s spilled out like toppled cards.

"ARTILLERY OUT FRONT," Kent-Alan screamed down from the arcade's second-story window. His cohorts scrambled back to the doors into which they'd just bolted. Imagine their surprise to anticipate tankfire and find a cache of weapons slumping onto the ground.

Wolf-eyes from the darkness, all peering out, like they had just seen a chicken coop collapse.

Have you had that wrecking ball feeling of knowing you've made a mistake? There was only a picture, surging in her head, of a long Giovanni rifle in large Anarch hands picking Camarilla brigadiers off a wall.

It was a ragtag assembly: the redhead broke out first, spry for a man barely able to move, slinging an M16 for himself and dragging two ammunition crates to safety. Christie was fast in-tow. One final Anarch scurried out from beneath that abandoned stack of sports cars where they left him—a young thing wearing a first-trauma face. He kept a Remington, kept a knit cap over his short auburn ponytail, and fought to keep hold on feathery Spanish. _Come on, Deac,_ Christie encouraged. He shot back twice before reaching cover and helping to haul the boxes in. They fireman's carried it all.

The Ventrue found an SMG she'd stolen. It was loaded and ready to go.

Nines had buckled his depleted handgun and chose an AK-47. He hefted it, squinted, then turned back to S.W. with a strange look. It looked just as angry, as implacable. But it also looked—and to this day, Ms. Woeburne is still not sure how the Baron did this—like she might be about to be given a chance.

"I told you," she said. There was no need to hit him to the underbelly again or to get him to explain that odd off-look. Ms. Woeburne edged to the opposite side of their vehicle barricade to peek out. She felt like catching her breath.

"It's no use now," the Ventrue swore, helplessly, looking like it, a miserable and dirty face. "It isn't."

This time, you had to believe her. There were only a few moments. They stood there with backs hurting against the van she'd destroyed.

"What the fuck could you do," Rodriguez said. Bloody bumps sprouted on bare patches where the Ventrue's dress had torn. She was bleeding inside the sleeves of her stolen coat. "That would help me?"

She ought to come up with something that wasn't a lie. She had to think about it.

"I'm a pretty good shot," Ms. Woeburne said.

 

**V.**

 

As it turns out: she was.

It's a strategic sacrifice, our good soldier reflected for herself, kneeling there where she was between a Toreador, a munitions crate, and a soda machine. A Foreman had sacrificed her ethics (what little remained of them); a Baron had sacrificed his safety (even less remained of that); a Prince sacrificed the long-sticking power of public execution for a convenient backdoor strike. It was a hefty line of compromises, and for Ms. Woeburne, crouched in her short sandals and ugly black gown, there was something precariously funny about it all.

 _Dear girl_ , he had said; dear girl, don't kid yourself; don't tell yourself lies; she did not want to hear any possible way that sentence could've end.

It was a series of sacrifices. But Los Angeles was not going to blithely sacrifice her.

Not if she had any sort of expert opinion about the whole thing.

With real, brick-and-mortar walls to shield them, the tiny Free-State army began to thin out what had been a full Society squadron some thirty minutes ago. Human liquids were faint and sulfuric on the air; they made the cracks in this old pavement, packed with sand, blush a rusty color, and it was an uncomfortably biblical metaphor. Crossfire that clustered like furious bees dispersed to infrequent, staccato flurries. Molotov cocktails shriveled up on sidewalk; Bach's men had sucked their gas reserves dry. Grünfeld himself was nowhere to be seen. By this point, Kent-Alan could spot four hunters in combat condition. Their russet trenchcoats were filthy with sweat, and their divine invocations were too low to hear.

There'd been no police involvement—not yet—and perhaps that was another Camarilla doing. Or maybe not. Police, you know, are obligated to run toward these kinds of things. They are required to shut-down riots and mob activity; they are expected to put citizens first. Except when they do not. Except when they decide, sucking their teeth, that the shots weren't at citizens, the fires were bottle-rockets, and nobody wants to die for a gang boy's life. Gang war, they say, is recurring, unstompable, like dandelion weed. You can't fight something like that. You can't fight organized crime.

And it had to be said: they'd only get in the way.

 _'Mine, at least,'_ Ms. Woeburne. chuffed to herself, took aim, sent two shots through a woman's ribcage. There was an implosion of tissues. One hit just a bit below the other; it was mechanical; it was the only way to be sure. Her head somersaulted backwards to collide with a fender and break.

"SPLAT. Clean as a whistle," Kent-Alan graded her—commentator, window neighbor, self-appointed moral support. "Nice eye, Cam. Good fucking shot."

She didn't really need the glasses; her death had fixed her eyes; but you know, Ms. Woeburne's brain still thought it was going blind.

They'd relocated to a vantage point on the first floor; the top-story, a cheap diner patio, was too uncovered. The Toreador picked off insurgents as they toed the edges. The man whose name she didn't know darted from window to window, breaking the glass, wielding a shotgun. Woeburne and Deacon each took one. Christie, if that was her name, alternated between firing a magnum and lobbing incendiaries. There weren't many, but as an act of kismet, S.W. had grabbed a carton of F-1s in her firepower scramble, and they were about to save everyone's hide. Rodriguez was hunkered down just outside the stronghold, ducked against that unfinished cement slab, a machine gun interval to keep an enemy from advancing on their front.

"Contained"—it's the diplomatic term, the automatic term she'd used.

Ms. Woeburne had never been in a large-scale firefight. Over the course of her service, shots had been fired, of course; the Foreman was even jumped once by a sad crew of Sabbat footmen in London. But the opportunity never arose for her to grind-in like a true-blue musketeer and put her boardroom-warrior lingo to the test. Until now—and do you know, there really wasn't all that much to it.

There is an aroma to gunfire, like a woodshop and a campfire left smoking overnight. It's overpowering at first, that scent—the mugginess—the buzzing deep in your ear canal. But after the blink of disorientation passes, and the bewilderment is over, Ms. Woeburne discovered that everything became distinctly underwhelming. Perhaps this is another Ventrue trait, being underwhelmed; maybe they all turn to dullness during disaster. Or maybe this is something human bodies do when faced with the possibility of instantaneous death. But S.W.'s focus profited from the shock; her sight tightened, colors sharp and light, with brutal accuracy. It left her feeling a little bit let-down.

Ms. Woeburne was a pessimist. She'd sort of figured her ashes would be peppering the Pacific by now—and there'd be either a big good-corporal funeral, or a really short one (about as long as it would take to throw her file into the garbage and erase her nametags). The reality was almost disappointing. She tried thoughtlessly to push an extra magazine into her pocket; pocketless, it hit the floor.

As if to respond, one bullet hurled through jagged remains of window glass and took a neat nosedive into someone's forehead.

It was the tattooed body, the carrot-top. The force propelled him across this hideous checkered floor and into a foosball table, where his extremities immediately began failing. Gray dust, like lint, or cinder, or the powder of teeth. It floated in the puddle of him, spreading in meaningless patterns across the bloodslick tile.

"SHIT," said Christie. She said MAN DOWN.

"STAY PUT," the Baron hollered without looking. Rodriguez's hands were full of a rifle and couldn't stop reloading to see if it was true. "DEACON. COVER HIM."

"Don't cover him, Deacon," Ms. Woeburne overwrote. It was their own private aside; nobody bothered talking to Nines. Deacon looked feebly at her across the place where that bullet had blown twinkling glass into the air, and she was disturbed by his helplessness. The eyes in his face seemed too large for a man. They were a tender brown that made Woeburne feel contempt for something—she could not explain, exactly, what. "Useless to. He's dead."

HE'S DEAD, Christie hollered.

Deacon glanced at his Sire, then back to the unsmiling Ventrue, who did not give him any real expression. Her pupils were period points, unemotional, unwelcoming, negative black.

Rodriguez cussed brutally, but couldn't afford the distraction of caring. No one looked back at the scatter of dust—not except Kent-Alan, who swallowed hard enough for Woeburne to hear it, then shakily readjusted his scope. This is the way Anarchs die.

"Keep your head down, Deacon," Christie said, who she must've noticed craning to see her. She was nice-looking for a Brujah, Ms. Woeburne decided (without that obtuse motorcycle helmet scrunching her face into a lemon, at any rate). Overly-long limbs and Grecian lines, a starling-colored ponytail. Looked like a girl she had known.

Not a friend, not really. Just a girl who had shared her room that first year away at boarding school; who wore country dresses with a keyhole over the bone at the base of her neck; who she'd found beautiful; who she'd found at five o'clock in the communal washroom one morning with a bottle of Ambien inside her and no note at all. Ms. Woeburne chose not to remember the girl's name. Yet she could still remember, with disconcerting lucidity, the set of her eyes, hanging there. White glaze, mammalian death. A suspended look of horror long after the mind inside had gone. They were old iron green.

It was not the same name, not the same person. But there was a catch, an unreal moment, where Ms. Woeburne saw that pretty Anarch's face and swore the eyes in it transformed into the cold-sturgeon eyes of that dead girl.

A late image, superimposed: she saw the width and dismay of that not-girl's eyes as they followed the bounce of grenade.

And they looked up in time to see fire blast off one edge of the room.

But it wasn't fire. It was something harder than that, something with momentum. Fire doesn't scatter chunks from concrete by itself; on its lonesome, fire does not crash; it doesn't rumble the earth beneath you and shake picture frames off walls. Hot air flushed through the forefront of their floor. Drafts of it broke apart like a hand, whirling flame upward, yellow fingers that dispersed in a huff. _No smoke_ , the Ventrue said—or thought she said— _but there's no smoke—_ and it came out strangled, like a protest, or like a complaint.

The _boom_ moved through the foundations. Ms. Woeburne felt it in everyone's bones.

It was impossible. It was, obviously. But possible or not, it looked to our soldier like the dust had shrieked in first; earth-before-fire. It paled Christie's tall boots fifteen feet away from them; it plastered Rodriguez, who'd been on the other side of the flash; they'd tossed the incendiary right between them. Dry cement turned the Baron's heavy leather into a colorless gray; his dark head of hair and her face were white. _Run_ , Christie said, or something like it; S.W. hadn't made it out; there was just the movement of lips on that same chalky face. The boardwalk seemed to rock. They were all on palm tree legs. Shards of wood from the bar were everywhere, like scattered glass. Something that might've been a pinball rolled on by.

It is not difficult. Being in a fight, she finds. Because it is not happening to you. Not in the moment, when the trigger goes off. In the moment, it's not a real thing—not so to speak. It's just images, war is. It's static shots, lights through a shutter, landscapes instead of people. You can see fine without the glasses. You see everything, but you don't see it together. It isn't happening to you.

It—meaning the blast-force—had hurled itself in like a Beaufort Twelve pancakes a hurricane cordon. Cement flew. _Nail bombs_ , she said. Or maybe she didn't. Maybe she just fell on the ground and said _shit_.

When the zoetrope stopped spinning, the images blended together, and she could see movement again, Ms. Woeburne became aware of Deacon shouting something right beside her. But the words were low and stretched, the voice not his own. She frowned at the lines of her feet. They were bright; the straps had cut into the rise of an ankle; her toes looked too proportional, too distinct. Debris just _everywhere_. Black spots, the Ventrue saw—black spotting across the asphalt and into the window frames, active, either on her eyes or in the air—she wasn't sure they were solid. She wouldn't have been, that is, if they hadn't made Rodriguez duck, fearfully, against the concrete slab he'd been using as cover. The Baron's face was grimacing and oddly alive. He tried to protect his head. Christie stumbled backwards to where her Childe and the Foreman were crouched tightly into themselves; they'd all been hit by the dissipating wash, and looked sad, bleached like corncobs cooked too long in charcoal. Or maybe she hadn't stumbled. She'd been thrown. Woeburne couldn't tell. Deacon went on shouting about whatever it was; his hands were under his Sire's arms, and he was dragging her backwards to their wall. Or maybe he'd caught her like that; her chin lolled, legs tangled, her body collapsing into a _G_.

The Ventrue's side was flush against these bricks like somebody shoved her. She was on her knees with the gun on the floor between them. It all felt sluggish. Her skull was clanging; it felt wet at the ears, wax or blood.

"You're bleeding," Ms. Woeburne was saying, unable to hear herself. "Look. Your blood."

She pointed absently to the foul red holes in the flats of Christie's hands. The Brujah must've thrown them up when the canister burst. Two disgusting evil-eyes had opened in the palms, and there were dark, solid shards lodged deep inside them. The Ventrue was not aware of a mean metal nut beaded in the meat of her own calf.

When something is killing you, it's a little difficult to question _what_ that thing is; you are panicked by the fact _that_ it is. She'd learn later—learn again years after, in fact, for it was not the last to be hurled in her direction—that Bach's troops had packed a landmine full of shrapnel, barbed wire, tacks, and poured it all into a chemical cocktail. Burned horribly. It felt like torture, even in the extremities. Felt like someone lit a match inside the hollow of your ribs.

Rodriguez let fly an ugly sound like a lion hit by a Bantam.

The Baron hit his knees and then went down to his hands, crumpling forward, elbows bowed out. Nines meant to say _help_ , but he barked blood on the asphalt; there was a fine rise of smoke from his coat. Christie stared at the disaster of her hands without seeing. Deacon had her cradled by the arms and a pellet gouged in the fat of his cheek. Kent-Alan's face was dismay; he aimed and shot back through the building, where someone was killed with a splatter and thud; he hadn't seen the runner close in behind them with the grenade.

No one seemed to have heard Ms. Woeburne. She sat down weakly on the cool tile, scowling; she saw the gouge in her leg; she spent a few minutes picking at it, puzzling how to get this hard germ out.

Everyone fired at once.

By the time Christie got up, crossfire popping like skillet oil, Rodriguez had managed to crawl himself halfway through the open front door. He looked like a soldier who'd been caught in barbed wire, set on by dogs. The façade glass was crunching under his arms. You could see where the blast had taken him; one side of that jacket was seared open, leaving a gape of charred cotton, leather, Kevlar and skin since he'd smothered the flame with his hands.

Kent-Alan laid his Weatherby on the checkered floor and ran to pull his Baron the final few feet inside.

Christie was fumbling. She had to detach Deacon; he'd lost the consciousness of his nerves; hers were dripping over everything, and couldn't find the shotgun she'd dropped. Kent-Alan dragged Nines ineffectively. Someone nearly shot the Toreador in the head where he stood; the bullet smashed a light fixture and blew through his Sunday bay-blond. He lay down next to the Baron and they both needed a rescue. _Stay there, stay there_ Rodriguez was yelling. The blood from his mouth looked too thick and too dark.

Deacon kicked over Kent-Alan's rifle, but Kent-Alan was too low to aim it and too scared to fire. The Baron flattened a hand on his back to keep him from bolting. You couldn't tell if that hand was to stop a spooked rookie from doing something stupid or because said rookie was currently lying between Rodriguez and the direction of gunfire. Christie over-and-over had to wipe off her palms.

Ms. Woeburne sat quietly, and she worked at her wound. It finally came free with a pinch of square nails. She'd had to make the fissure larger to stick two digits in. The entire chunk of muscle throbbed. But she held on to that shard, and she studied it, and there on the floor of Seashore Arcade, among the Pac-Man and the foosball, S. Woeburne saw the tips of her fingers begin to sear.

"Get them out," she called to everyone, but no one else was close enough to hear. In truth, the Foreman hadn't called; she'd spoken, evenly, thinking anything that required this much effort must've been a shout. "The shrapnel. It's covered in something. It's burning. Take it out."

Deacon looked with those wide baby eyes at Ms. Woeburne. He touched his face. The musketball sore was hideous, oozing and frightfully round. Since he'd returned to their window, squatting there in the airiness of trauma like a child who'd been blindsided by a punch, she kneeled in front of him and helped pull the round embedded in his face. The tear ducts were working hard to rinse everything clean. He let her push his chin aside and bat the Brujah's palms away. _"Let me see,"_ she ordered, _"Give it here."_ It was shallow enough to use her thumb and forefinger again. But the dislodged ball gave a spittoon sound—a glug of blood—that made Ms. Woeburne want to vomit. She turned and spat in preparation. The bile didn't come.

 _Don't do it,_ Rodriguez said, but S.W. followed the line of his sight, and Christie did it anyway.

The Ventrue could not see every piece of this, because maybe her head was still ringing and maybe a Brujah's Celerity is stronger than an ancilla's brain, but she understood what happened. Deacon's face was in her hands one moment, and as Ms. Woeburne twisted her head around to be sick, there was a forward blur. Christie sleeved off her fingers; she dropped her shoulders; and she dashed across the no-man's-land of shattered windows and casings, hopping Kent-Alan and Nines where they lay, to reach the overhang outside. Without stopping, the woman slid to her hip like a baseball player, tearing the leg of her jeans on sidewalk; she grabbed Rodriguez's dropped machinegun. Then she was up and over the concrete barricade, firing, losing a full clip before feeling her hands.

The first wave disbanded. The second ruptured a flatbed's fuel tank, gushing petrolium onto asphalt. The third—and in good stories, it's always the third—tore off one hunter's arm, pounced, and hit, apparently fruitless, a package of flares.

It wasn't the light that got them. It was the sneeze of sparks, right onto that waiting gasoline.

The far pier swirled into fire.

And you should certainly guess if you couldn't know: Leopold didn't shoot back that time.

A mash of noise went up: voices, a shorting car siren, metal of all kinds. The puddles of gas burnt quickly. Car bits withered, spectacularly, into the rubble. The smoke was bitter and the sticking kind. The five of them still in Seashore Arcade watched slackly down the catastrophe of walkway, towards the beach, where it was still blue surf and white sand.

Christie was left looking at mess that she made, a crude silhouette against a fast red burn, and her jaw had fanned open, and the machinegun was hanging like an extension of arm.

When these people lose themselves, they'll not stop swinging. Their ship is taking on water and they're still at the guns. They'll take everything you have, the Brujah will; they'll spend four of their five breaths left to make you cry. These nights, in Los Angeles and wherever else, it's a final few cannonballs and a couple more gallons of gasoline—the last they've got before the enfilade comes full circle, the war horse founders, the bow breaks apart.

Kent-Alan rose shakily from the blast marks and the dust. He had walked over to where Deacon stood—halfway out of their building, gaping after his Sire, still crying with the pain of a bullet hole in his face—before remembering the Weatherby still lying in flecks of glass.

Then he noticed Rodriguez was still there, too. Ms. Woeburne did not see he had probably been killed but for the sudden, fearsome black through the Baron's teeth.

Deacon said it first. S.W. had just found her legs again when he sent everyone running outside.

Christie shoved Kent-Alan and Ms. Woeburne out of her way, to put it simply, the biker's pads on her kneecaps clacking when she hit concrete. Nines looked dead—the way he'd been left on his stomach, forehead bowing towards the tile, dripping blood from his mouth and his nose. He managed to get back up on both elbows, but that was all. The Anarch was yelling at him in a panic now, but Rodriguez ignored her, or didn't see her, or didn't care—and he didn't move like a man standing up—but collapsed over, curled on one side with a groan, wrapping both arms over the side the grenade took off.

Christie sat on her knees with those almost-familiar dead eyes. _But I won_ , they wanted to say. _It was me._

What is that like, Ms. Woeburne wonders—to become a hero while your people are losing a war—when you can be assured that, no matter what you win or who you throw off their horse, there will always be a funeral at home. The Brujah's ten fingers were hovering with no inkling as to what they ought to be doing. They extended, retracted, thumped hopelessly to her thighs. The blood was a vicious, hundred-year pitch, the red-black color of ancilla, oil and grave earth; it spider-webbed; it didn't stop running out.

She turned him onto his back and stared, because that's what people do when someone is dying and they've got no idea what else there is to be done.

"What do I do," she called, blankly, and looked directly at Ms. Woeburne, and their eyes met, and you couldn't see anything partisan now.

The Ventrue—not taking too kindly to having been pushed against a wall—didn't get much satisfaction from snatching Christie's collar and jerking the rest of her aside. She made enough room for herself to stoop.

"Where were you shot," Woeburne demanded, dropping to a knee for better visuals. Deacon and Kent-Alan had drifted back in at some point; in becoming aware of them behind her, she realized she still had a gun in one hand. Woeburne set it on the floor beside her foot. There was dirt smudged between her open toes.

The Baron's face was wrenched into something that didn't look much like the Baron, at all. His nose wrinkled into a horrendous snarl, and he was clutching his stomach, puffing something horrible, dark flecks in the air. Dirty blood kept on in drops, and it made the Ventrue cringe, brief disgust, when a few spotted her pedicure.

Rather than sit on her hands with the rest of them and ask in slow, stupid words, ARE YOU ALL RIGHT, the Foreman looked away from Christie, who stared at her pathetically over the fallen Baron. She nudged Kent-Alan's calf out of her light. Then, with not much else to do, she brought both palm heels roughly down on Rodriguez's shoulders in a stern attempt to open him up, undoing the instinctual shape animals make when they are feeling hurt—that sickle-moon of kicked mutts, cold toms, humans with broken ribs. He was too hurt so stop her.

There appeared to be very little gone wrong, Ms. Woeburne saw, avoiding the Brujah's face, searching for perforations. Charmarks, bruises, small cuts, the bloodclotted dents where she'd gouged her nails into the few soft spots of his hands.

"I don't see anything," she told them, snout scrunched because she was revolted and because she was upset. Hair over her scowl; scars in her gown; blood on the clean feet inside flat, empire sandals and there was something treacherously auxilia about S. Woeburne. It felt horrible having to touch him. She was still so full of hate. "There's nothing here. I don't understand; he isn't even—isn't even—"

Finding no wounds, S.W. gestured impatiently for the others to turn him over; she seized the scalded edge of jacket and wrenched it up. The fussing made him let out an embarrassing yawp. With leather in her fingers, Ms. Woeburne could scent the flesh, see the buckshot scattering along the Anarch's ribs.

It was gruesome; these things usually are. Tissues wept around deeply entrenched spits of metal. They were like little black star-marks, unsanitary with rust. Some of them were sharp and deep enough not to see anymore. The Brujah was hunched up and shaking after being moved. He might've been playacting it felt worse than it was, but Woeburne couldn't tell with these people, and could not imagine why.

A closer look, then.

Each slug left a telltale coin-shaped dent. Look closely enough—past the blood, the dirt, the mess of this place—and you could see, in the bucket of the wound, something sizzling. Something like garlic, she thought, or red coals, or a minefield, or what the movies tell you it must've smelled like in Vietnam.

Christie's palms were still where they'd landed on the Baron's side. They seemed odd. The dragon's eye holes in them had not sealed.

"Your hands," Ms. Woeburne cried. "Look at your hands."

She picked them up and saw the bubbling foam. _Phosphorus_.

That wouldn't do. That wasn't going to work, at all.

It took almost no time. Deacon had launched to the bar sink, twisting the faucet, shoveling cupped hands of water into his face. Still dripping, sort of able to see, he dragged Christie there, too—she was gaping dismally at her hands—and shoved both his Sire's arms beneath the tap, holding them there. You could hear the woman roaring before it started, after it stopped. That raw meat, smoked hide odor had never been this sharp. No one minded the shot in the Ventrue's leg. She stood up with a start and backed away several steps as though she was searching for something, afraid of a shadow, not sure what.

"Get him off the floor. All of you get off the floor. Now. Now," Woeburne shrieked when they stared at her.

Christie's sleeves were sopping with the sinkwater. She and Deacon each grabbed one of Rodriguez's arms; Nines, blearily awake then, tried to walk on his own, but couldn't make either knee lock. They carried their Baron inside, off the glass—semi-delirious, still spitting ichors—and sat him on a clothless plywood table, probably for cards. He couldn't keep upright. The Brujah tried not to lie on his back, crumpled again to one side, and was turned to his breastbone; Ms. Woeburne covered her nose. It is an old, old aroma all things that eat animal know. Her kind are polite carnivores; they are still vultures, swallow-whole beasts who always show first to a kill.

"We aren't safe here," Deacon swore, and he'd said it before, and he'd say it again. He'd stuffed sloppy, ugly handfuls of brown paper towels around Christie's arms in a tourniquet, elbow-to-finger papier-mâché. It was a dismal amateur cast. She looked, like a little boy, too sad about her hands to stop him. Meanwhile, Kent-Alan had a plastic pitcher full of cold water to wash out the Baron's wounds, but it was useless; they were full of metal. Nines screamed and the steam went up smelling like a bomb. "We're not. They'll be coming—somebody will. We have to go; we're fucked if we don't get off this pier."

He was right. There was no guarantee all the hunters were dead, or that the flames outside wouldn't spread in here. Furthermore, the police delayed, but firefighters might not; both were due eventually, she was sure, to repair what they could, and to contain the rest. Yes, that word again. _Contain_.

"He can't be moved; he'll die," Ms. Woeburne told them. They all looked at her on the cusp of a dirty old rib bone of hate.

It seemed increasingly possible—with the collar of her dress, the polish on her toes, peppered in blood and the remnants of phosphorus seared in her calf—that the Baron might die. This concerned S.W. to a certain point. If it happened, as it looked likely to, these Anarchs would wail for only a second—and then, with grief in their eyes and chemicals in their pores, they were going to kill her. She could not think about it. You just cannot think about things like that.

So, instead of thinking, the Ventrue groused _get out of the way!_ She found the switchblade in the Baron's remaining pocket, and used that to saw one large surgeon's stripe through his melting coat; it had to be peeled away. Some threads had sutured down where the shrapnel had hammered in. It devoured his bulletproof like cardboard paper. Waxy, yellowish liquor bubbled around the splinters, chewing through sinew. Hemoglobin, a red as dark as graphite, left in tributaries from the Brujah's nose and lips. Resentment and dismay—these are the things a Foreman is made of. She hadn't really noticed, with the overwhelming smell of fire and the throbbing in her hurt leg, that Rodriguez lost consciousness a minute ago, roundabout the time Kent-Alan doused him. And you had to wonder if he'd used that boy as a bodyshield. And you had to wonder if the boy knew.

And you had to wonder if Sebastian was going to make a speech over her casket.

There wasn't going to be a court appeal; definitely not; LaCroix's administration couldn't afford to be implicated in something that stank like assassination. She was going to get blamed for the whole shebang. Oh, yes. Full stop. Complete certainty. He would deny it and not defend her. It was then Ms. Woeburne had this thought, returning, a whisper or a lick or a crackle of brushfire at the underside of her brain: The Party will not defend her.

What did it matter right now, anyway. If Rodriguez didn't get up off this table (and maybe even if he did), the Foreman knew a pack of Free-Statesmen who weren't likely to let her leave. These have never been the sort of people to press charges. They are far more disposed to find someone vulnerable, like a lone Ventrue, to hurt—to smash her joints, twist off her arms, slit her nice throat and watch the forked tongue gargle in blue.

"Don't do that," Woeburne snapped. Kent-Alan, holding the empty pitcher, looked like he was considering slapping Rodriguez across the face. "What's wrong with you?"

"I didn't want him to pass out; I was—"

"He's already passed out; leave it. Leave. You wouldn't want to be awake for this."

Christie was still sad—too sad to fight a Ventrue, too sad to speak. Deacon looked deathly with the groove in his baby-fat cheek. "For what?" he wanted to know.

Ms. Woeburne stood her ground with a sober look, a sore throat, and the switchblade pointing down. "What do you think I am doing with the knife?"

 _Oh hell no,_ Deacon wheezed, but who cared what he thought about it. The lone Ventrue wanted to live.

She gave it a shot, anyway.

The knife was disarmingly light in the crease of her hand. _Is it the same knife_ , she wondered, letting herself be distracted, anything not to worry about the silhouettes behind her with their loaded guns. It didn't feel that way. A knife doesn't feel the same when it's along the curve of your palm, not in the gullies of your knuckles. She didn't feel the same. And she couldn't tell you what that meant, or why it wasn't significant—not at the time—to be able to do this, to stomp your fear beneath your imperial shoe; to press on; to not red pen the kill zone; to forget, for a handbreadth, keeping your teeth and your venom tucked in, who you are, and why it matters, and who is not deserving of your service, and what happens if no one ever is.

Careful not to touch something harmful, that bullet imprint still burning in her leg, the Foreman wedged its tip beneath one pellet. A frightening hiss rose when steel hit steel. But the stainless brand was sharper than expected; it parted flesh like it had the fabric, a nonpartisan tool, not caring who did the stabbing. Rodriguez choked awake on air stuck inside himself. Then one hard, unfeeling flick of her wrist, and she levered the scale out of a spasming dorsal. It clinked off somewhere into the arcade. There was a smell of boiling furniture polish. She lifted the knife back out.

"Oh my God," Kent-Alan rued, lolling behind; she didn't care where.

But Ms. Woeburne was encouraged. She'd gotten one out. The reeling Brujah was less-enthused; you couldn't exactly blame him, tangentially aware of the surroundings, silence broken into a mastiff yelp that made his followers jump in those sad warrior skins. Woeburne did her best not to be deterred. Her leg hurt, but her mind was stark and smart.

"Stop it. Stop moving," the Ventrue chastened. She flattened the length of her free arm along his spine, an effort to control the shifting. Ms. Woeburne felt like she was holding down a larger, uncalm thing that might at any second lose its domesticity and bite her. Her gums were dry and there was a flimsy gasoline taste. Her elbow was parked behind his head, and its point alarmed him in the confusion of injury. There was no sympathy in that voice, but that wasn't surprising; there was little of it left to be had in her; it was one of those organs she had sniffed down and amputated, a long time ago. She was gratified by how coolly her wrists behaved. They did not shake at all. He looked very gray and makeshift beneath the compact translucence of her hands. "Listen to me. You've been shot. You've been shot, do you understand? Corrosive ordnance. Don't move. I'm going to try to help you. To say clearly: stay still or you're going to die."

"You. Shit," Rodriguez panted, like somebody sick-drunk, sounding really miserable through the disaster of nerves. Blood and saliva hit the wood. His hands white-knuckled the table. It was the first thing he'd been able to say since the rounds hit. "Not _you_."

Ms. Woeburne forked the next one out with a little less campaign concern.

"We can't stay here. We can't be here," Deacon was needling; his Sire's hands left noticeable prints on the neonate's jacket, and they'd dried darkly in this heat. Christie looked dejected where she sat, slumped forward, tourniquets dangling, on an edge of counter space. They were all a mess; Ms. Woeburne weeviled the knife under a third bullet scrap; the _tink_ sound of loose metal made the boy jitter. The woman put her face in her brown paper hands.

"I realize," Woeburne hissed. Her ligaments were getting sore; the space between each finger felt tacky. Her bangs bothered her and stuck to the Ventrue's forehead.

"I'm telling you: we have to go. Whatever we're going to do—"

"Leave, then. No one is keeping you. Or tell me exactly what it is that 'we're' going to do. If you've got feedback. If you have a suggestion."

"I don't know," he boomed—except the boom was a squeal and his clean, even teeth clapped when they tried to grind. "I don't fucking know; you're the badge. You said to do this. You told us—"

"I AM AN EDITOR," she shouted.

Tension like this—well, it usually pools at the head. Which is the mast of the body, when you think about it. There is limited space there for mad energy to stagnate. It overflows to the spinal cord, leaking through arteries, into the tailbone. Blood slicked her arms to the tips of her elbows. It smelled awful to her, a rawness like smoke, uncooked venison and petrol. Ventrue blood has none of these connotations. Ms. Woeburne felt unwell again, but it was wooziness this time, not the gutsy sear of nausea. The scent of death, or maybe the action of it, made her lightheaded and a little bit sick.

"I am a Foreman _,"_ she lamented, raggedly, when they went silent; somebody had to speak. "I'm a bureaucrat. An attaché. A junior officer." She pried two slivers from where they'd been steaming. Each put a squirm and a hurt-wolfhound flinch through the Anarch. "Do you understand? I censor papers. There's your fascist for you," the Foreman spat. Her little finger had blistered. She could feel a sour heat. "I hope you're satisfied. I hope you choke on it. Here's your spy. Here's your fucking cobra."

"Ventrue. Stop. Everybody. Shut up. Stop talking," Rodriguez began, but the pain broke into it, and he couldn't finish. The damage to his lung bared the Anarch's teeth, spattered blood between both hands. One of his fists hammered the wood beneath him and made everything lurch. The pocketknife had been stuck in a stringy band that felt like a tendon. Everything was slippery and stinging; she was glad she could not see the distortion of a blown-up Brujah's face.

"Don't move. Don't," she flared, hackles up, hood out. "I do not owe you this."

Rodriguez didn't have anything more to say—either because he was humbled, or because he was trying not to die.

' _Both,'_ she decided, as it gave her a little solid ground to think so.

"How much time do you—?"

"Not much," she told Christie. "I'm nearly—I might be done."

The Ventrue's reassurances were antiseptic as an airline pilot. The beds beneath her nails were itching; perhaps it was acid burn, perhaps it was the blood, perhaps it was the stress. She extracted all but a single chip, which burnt out before the knife could find it. The entire surgery took five minutes at most—not that Ms. Woeburne could've told you so. She prefers accuracy over haste; you know that; but sometimes there's no time to spare. You can't let a Baron's spinal column weld to his guts—nor could you admit, for the illness it brought, that you touched the bones beneath the holes.

 _Shit_ , she said, for the hundredth time tonight.

Potholes steamed in the frayed muscle, cauterized and devastated, each an inch apart. She pinched the bridge of her nose to block out the sulfur still lingering outside, putting an absentminded smear on either side. And she wore that blood like warpaint, but didn't notice—and no one, knowing the history of the Ventrue and the loss of their own, said a word.

"That's it. That's done. I can't do anything else."

Three mechanical steps backward took the Foreman away from him as though it had all been a biology project, inanimate and formaldehyde-dead. Ms. Woeburne shook her hands out. She about-faced and stepped out of their stopgap emergency room, her sandals navigating the chemicals fused into the floor. Brujah replaced her on every side. They paid the retreating Camarilla little mind.

"Ventrue?" the Baron coughed out before she could shove through the arcade's kitchen door. He was trying to lift himself on his forearms—a slumping, punchy, frowning creature. Soldiers crowded him. Christie had picked up the knife and slit her shoulder with it; it was the only convenient place that hadn't smoldered and wasn't stuck with napkins. He choked up a large spatter of blood.

"I'm done," she repeated, throat tight, in case nobody heard. Ms. Woeburne was aware she must have looked very odd and disheveled. Her posture was aggressive; her dress had gone savage; she limped on her injured leg. "You're done. That's it."

If Nines Rodriguez could scowl it all into making sense, there would be a different order in LA tonight. He searched with unhappy confusion. You could hear his wounds dripping. She did not care for the metronome of sound.

"Where the hell are you going?" he asked.

It was nearly two o'clock in the morning. She looked at him with his blood on her face and she gave the only answer you have, if you're Good People like her.

"I'm going back," Ms. Woeburne said.

Then, true to her word—because even when they lie, corporals try to be true to their words—she swept numbly into the staff bathroom, stripped her dress, and tried to go back to the way she was before.

Adrenaline exorcised the shock. _It's finished_ , she thought, standing there on flat soles in her underwear, wrists hell again, twisting the hot water until it would scorch. She had no immediate thought of the future. She knew only that she had to tear the bad color from her body, erase the offenses, scald off the skin.

Ms. Woeburne plunged breathlessly head-and-shoulders into Seashore Arcade's industrial sink. She washed herself quickly and quietly: rinsed the muck from her hair; scrubbed her legs and feet with a washcloth; scoured stains off the balls of her hands. Being clean was insanely, irrationally restorative. Dust sloughed off to a painful, pristine pink. Soap-soft hair slouched a dark chocolate around temples and cheekbones. It felt cold. In the burn of these last few minutes, it felt wonderful.

Satisfied, decontaminated, she wrung the moisture out of her gown and tugged it on. Damp fabric stuck uncomfortably, but it didn't bother her; not like that white phosphorous had; not like standing with the enemy behind her and a blade in her hands. She welcomed the squish of wet velvet and black fibers sticking in a drain. She opened the overhead cabinets.

Bar soap, suntan lotion, makeup canisters—they tumbled out and into the suds. Ms. Woeburne rummaged through them with clumsy, halfhearted hope. She stickered a square of gauze to her calf with two band-aids. She reapplied the darkest lipstick she could find; she did not bother with the rest. It was only enough to make her look human. That's the only thing that matters, honestly.

There was only a moment in which Ms. Woeburne stopped to clutch the porcelain and exhale.

Then she mopped the lingering stink of Brujah blood off her arms with Citrus Zest antibacterial napkins; she stole a sedan; and she drove, ten-and-two, back to the party.


	51. Tumbling After

Lily slid through the dingy door, nearly broke an ankle on a console controller, and cursed her way to where Knox Harrington sat on his threadbare living room couch.

"Snap. How'd that get over there?" the ghoul wondered, mouth full of Italian sub. Knox was sitting cross-legged on the crosshatched purple catastrophe of sofa, paper stacks surrounding him. His fingers smeared mustard grease. His eyes, with the usual electricity, crinkled in greeting, caught mid- meaty bite. "My bad. I'm a freaking slob, dude. Total lost cause. Sorry about that," he managed through the lettuce, smelling like garlic, highlighter, and printer ink. One or two flakes escaped the parameters of his mouth and disappeared between ugly cushions. "In other news: welcome back?"

_'Garlic,'_ Lily noticed, hopped to their couch, and, with for snort just for herself, pulled at the four toes she'd stubbed.

The thin-blood had been living with Knox at the top of this three-story Santa Monica low-rise (which was marginally less crappy than her car's backseat) for two weeks now; his apartment, a double-bedroom outfit, sat right above Devil's Brand Tattoo Parlor. It was an odd place. He'd offered "somewhere to crash" that night in Hollywood mainly out of pity; she'd accepted out of desperation. Lily had nothing to lose. And, though her new room didn't look like much—his "study" was cramped with newspaper clippings, musty magazine articles and squeaky, overflowing bookshelves—a roof was better than the alternative. It was better than the blue haze of tiny cars with privacy windows. It was better than being alone.

She slept on a platform mattress sans the platform. An orphan can't be picky. An orphan ought to look past the unshaded lamps, the ceiling cobwebs, the cold wood, and the occasional ants. An orphan has no grounds to complain.

Safety is a more precious commodity than carpet, anyway. Lily couldn't claim piece-of-mind. She lived here now—stepping on centipedes, napping long hours, sharing a refrigerator with another vampire's ghoul—but anything was an improvement on sleeping in that car. Some nights, she'd sit on her bed cocooned in a starchy quilt and stare through the single window, watching seashore rain and streetlights through old foggy glass. The pawnshop was never busy. Gallery Noir down the block was full of obscure art. The Mercy Hospital next door never felt large or well-lit enough. Smoky head shops, late-night volleyball, the fetish clubs that thrummed till dawn. You could eat anywhere here, if you were a real vampire. She knew where her yesterday friends camped. She was still not sure which alleys and which beaches were legal grounds for people like her to hunt.

And there was her host to consider. Moving in with some hyper, jittery twenty-eight-year-old whose sobriety status she seriously questioned seemed harebrained. It also seemed like the only option she had. But, as things turned out—and for her, they usually don't, so maybe you and Lily can take this together as a sign—they cohabited well. Knox was a weirdo; he could be juvenile, at times; he was distracted, itchy and frustrating; he came with the bad habits of leaving snack cartons scattered around, biting his thumbnails, and wandering restlessly at night; the planes of his large flat feet creaked the hollows under the floorboards. Other times, though, he was all she could've asked for in a roommate, and in a friend. He was diligent about the bills if not the dishes; he pooled their resources; he boarded up the windows every morning without being asked, made no issue of her femaleness, and above all—more than anything else—and more than everything else—he always looked happy to see her.

Lily learned a lesson from all of this bullshit. If you check your suspicions, forget your attractions, buckle up your real-world boots and pull that stick out of your ass, people can surprise you.

_"That's awful,"_ Knox had said when she told him, staring into his folded hands, side-to-siding in his old rubber shoes. It took him some thinking; that was all. He brightened like a Bunsen burner. _"Well, hell. I can't just, like, leave you hanging; I don't want that on my conscience. So—and this is going to sound kind of crazy, but hey—I live right around here. Up in the burbs. If you need someplace to prop—you know what I mean?"_

She did.

Knox's "someplace to prop" was pretty typical of a person his age in certain ways: unmade sheets, fruit flies on apple bowls, lights left on. But there were a handful of creepy outliers. A fine layer of dust frosted the place, thickening appliances and cabinet handles, staining the chairs he'd apparently carpentered himself. Loose camera gear cluttered in unusual quantities—fancy lenses, zoom scopes, shoeboxes of memory cards—which he explained was normal for a moonlighting photographer. More bizarre, though, was the sheer wealth of books he'd accumulated. _Paranormal Schools of the Late 1800s_ (every edition), an outdated copy of _Glossary Occult_ , and conspiracy theories that would roll those Paranormal Scholars' eyes crowded out vases, frames, any shape of décor. Knox read even faster than he talked, ripping through databases in the space of a few nights. Lily didn't question his good intentions. She merely wondered about his mental health, sometimes.

For now, though, she was tired. Lily resituated on the uncomfortable couch; a pillow button was gouging her thigh. Knox sat crisscross-apple-sauce in the opposite corner with his dinner on his lap, a soda can on the coffee table, and paperwork clustered about. Her roommate's faded Led Zeppelin tee was rumpled in the way of those who don't bother with drying machines. Prickly brown hair jutted above large ears. Lily, full of boredom and fatigue, dethreaded the edges of her denim shorts for what felt like longer than it was.

"You got onion on your knee," she informed him. The ghoul glanced down at his pinstriped lounge pants with some bewilderment.

"Whoa. Nasty. How long has that been there?" He peeled off and flung the slice for a nearby trash can. It sutured to a plastic side and stuck. "Where the hell did those napkins get to? I'd have gotten you a BLT or something if… But hey, girl," Knox remembered, twisting around to Lily, notebook at one side and an errant pen splotch rubbed into his nose. She'd been out hunting tonight. "Enough about me and my Subway malfunctions. How did it go?"

"OK," the thin-blood said, flinging off her flip-flops. They smacked on the ground, one after the other. _Whap-thup_. Long fingers did their best to massage the throbbing out of her heel; she'd always nagged at E that these damn violent videogames were hazardous to public health. "It went fine. Some waiter. Works at that cheesy diner right down Main Street; Surfside. He was pretty lame. I cleaned him up and laid him down across the street—what's that place called? The Asylum. Everybody'll think he's drunk or something. For what it's worth, I guess: I didn't take much."

Lily was careful not to overindulge, and _careful_ was harder it should've been—harder than it had been, a year or two before. She compensated for her dull senses by targeting two or three victims per hunt, taking a few measly pints from each. Feeding was an unsatisfying and awkward experience. She would rather feel sloppy than whimper home with the guilt of having killed.

"Cool." The story had taken too long; Knox went back to his work, flipping pages, squinting them down. Neon gold roved over the tidy black typeface. She got a little annoyed.

"What are you up to?" Lily asked. It was rare he didn't clamber for vampire stories—because to him, she still was one.

Knox shrugged. "Nothing special. Just some stuff for my master I've got to look at. You know: work, work, work. That's all I do. Want to watch something?" he suggested, locating the remote and tossing it over. "Don't worry; won't bother me. Multitasking is one of my natural talents. I think _House_ is on. Don't tell anybody this, dude, but I'm practically a hypochondriac."

Cinematic thrombosis didn't seem appealing to a bashful monster who'd recently filled her belly with blood. "Got any good movies?" Lily wondered instead. "Want me to run out and grab something?"

"Nah, girl; we got Netflix. Flip on what you want. But no Marvel. No chick flicks. Unless it's _Joe Versus the Volcano_."

Lily took the remote. She made a token show at browsing, then blindly chose some sci-fi, trying her best to tune out all this noise. Her twisted ankle rotated experimentally. She'd painted her nails last night—it was a gross pastel pink picked out of a convenience store rack—and with one finger, traced the constellation of freckles up her calf and around the kneecap. Tiny brown clusters at every corner, under every clothing. Mom used to call her Dapples when she'd been a kid, after the speckled gray thoroughbreds she and Uncle Jonas raised in Oregon. They'd just buried a white-maned brood mare when she'd flown out to California for school. Her mother told elaborate stories for teary little cousins about Horse Heaven and soldiered on with ranch affairs, but blubbered like a baby later, when she and Lily left a wreath of bluebells in the empty stall. God, Lily missed Mom so bad it made her stomach hurt.

She thought of going back so many times. Mom loved her. Mom would understand. Mom wouldn't think she was a monster or call a bunch of men in long coats to put her away. And still, here came that nagging feeling, frightened and so sure, a dark spot in the underworkings of her mind: _There is nothing left for you_. Spring foals, saddle oil, and vanilla cakes collapsing under candles were memories that belonged to someone else—made by someone else's mother—for some other girl.

Better to do anything else but risk having that destroyed. Better to be alone in Los Angeles than face the possibility all those freckled faces wouldn't love her anymore.

Lily doesn't know the propaganda. She isn't sure of what's true; she only knows what can't be, or shouldn't be, and the things she isn't going to test. But for all of that stupidity, and for all of that missing, and for all of her yearning to undo it, go back, the thought molted, and it stayed: What if she couldn't love them?

_"I've got to live here,"_ she told herself; it was the only thing worth keeping from that man and those people.

"So what kind of work does Betram have you on tonight?" Lily pulled her bootstraps out of the sadness with some forced interest. She looked at the T.V. Riddick was parlaying the advances of some scaly, space opera Lady Macbeth. "I feel kind of shitty about not helping out with the rent. Need anything sorted or dog-eared?"

"Um." He was chewing on an inner cheek. "Nah. No sweat, homegirl. S'all good. Cool of you to offer. But it's all junk I should probably check out firsthand. Bertram has got me… what do I call it?"

"Reading?" Lily cracked; he didn't bother laughing.

"I guess you could say I'm keeping tabs on some regulars. Boss says his boss is real cynical about his employees. Corporate chain and all that." Having wolfed down his supper, needing to fidget and incapable of sitting still, the ghoul went for a mechanical pencil. He gnawed it out of shape and accidentally bit the eraser off. The nub spat into his hand and disappeared into their cushions with shavings, loose-leaf bits, and shredded cheese. "Got me rooting through a whole crapload of data. I feel sort of weird about it," he admitted, turning another sheet. Stubby fingers scratched at an ear lobe. "At first I thought—vampires and all—this job would be James Bond, Double-Oh-Seven stuff, right? But it's not. Not usually, anyway. Usually it's just a bunch of e-mails and appointments. Random, harmless crap like that. Letters. Music. Porn. Rants, dick pics, dear-diaries. Just dumb everyday shit."

"Dick pics. Vampires."

Knox eyeballed her sidelong. "You _really_ don't know any Toreador. Anyway—just goes to show you how easy it is for someone to go through your stuff. Big Brother's alive and kickin,' dude. And he's, like, doxing your fan fiction."

He'd've made a good private eye, Lily thought. Or a good hunter.

"How do you get a hold of all this stuff, anyway?" She reached for a sheaf of papers.

Knox sprang before Lily made contact, hugging the heap to his hunched-forward chest. They crumpled beneath defensive elbows. She relaxed. He breathed quickly, let the tightness drop.

"Hoo-wow, see what you made me do? Sorry. Little jumpy. Nosferatu'll get you like this. Ha-ha." He tried to laugh it off. But her face drew a cautious, disturbed blank from her slumping edge of sofa. She didn't like how quickly he could move.

"Really, it's not a big deal," Knox mumbled, trying to melt back into place, unable to soften enough. His nerves hummed through that pointy nose. He reminded her, scrunched reports and honey-bee eyes, of a manic red border collie with kinks in his ears and a constant urge to pace. "Before all this went down, I was a computer science guy. IT, web security stuff. Basically got paid to screw around with community bank websites, see what I could break, so they could test their defense systems. Bounty hunted off it for a while. I'm pretty good at that kind of thing. Not like busting the impenetrable wall of MySpace is exactly a finesse gig, but yeah. I think that's probably why he chose me. My master, I mean. What about you?"

"I don't know. I think I was just there." Lily glanced to the television. She shifted. Orange hair tangled between her palm heel and the dents it left on her cheek. "Computer science. I don't think I could do it. I'm not wired that way. One time I tried a programming class in college, but I dropped it after a couple weeks. It looked too hard for me to really get a grip on."

"That's what she said," blurted out of him, and Knox flickered into giggles.

Lily ignored the jab, used the laughter to her advantage, and pounced for a stray leaflet. She tore two pages in the ensuing scuffle before yanking one away. He dropped his folders in a flutter of parchment; manila scattered the carpetless floor. Knox scrambled to pry the thing away from her, but though thin—blood and body—she was faster; a bare foot wedged itself between her stolen sheet and his awkwardly lunging breastbone. They scuffled to the couch's far hemisphere, nearly tumped it over, and a tower of books on the cocktail table before Lily emerged victorious.

With a bent shin holding Knox at bay, the Caitiff hoisted her hard-earned paper overhead and squinted at its conservative font.

 

* * *

 

**TO: [NO NAME]**  
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**  
**DATE: AUGUST 5 2010 11:30 PM**  
**SUBJECT: REGARDING SUNDAY**

 

Be Advised:

I cannot close as scheduled. The investigation requires a security bypass; this is a delicate process and cannot be bull-rushed. I simply need more time.

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
LOS ANGELES

 

* * *

 

Lily stared numbly through the name until a palm smashed it away.

"No fair," he wailed, tugging out the wrinkles and scouring over what she'd just seen. Relief sanded the worry off his expression. It wasn't important. Knox flattened a hand over the e-mail and smoothed new creases over one knee, something that increased the damage, not fixed it. He couldn't have known how a simple motion could make a person's heart freeze.

"Hah!—you got me good, girl. Sick moves. Told you it was disappointing. Nothing too special, see? Bertram has me tailing the dullest bloodsuckers. Ventrue are strictly business, you know? Turns out, though," he said, finger shaking, tongue clucking, ignorant to how her stomach was dropping, throat closing up. Lily felt dizzy. She could not have read that name. "Sometimes it's bad business. Funny name, right? Woeburne. I mean, I can't be sure until I get more proof and find some outgoing files, but I got a lead about this one. We think she's been selling company information. I mean, yeah—Ventrue—duh. But selling it to Anarchs? That's a pink slip, no buts about it. That's a freaking firing squad. Geez-oh-man, if it's true, boss is going to wig-out! Maybe I'll get, like, promoted. I don't know if ghouls get promoted."

"She's not," Lily spat, coldness seeping up her nerves, a flameless candle. Her tongue was a rock. Knox stared.

"Not what, girlfriend?"

She felt too stiff. _Stiff_ isn't adequate. A heavy strain—like cardiac arrest, like someone tilting cement down her lungs—began to spread. It crawled through the confines of her weak chest, pushed everything else out. This was a slow, painful, horrible kind of rigor. She wanted to hold her cheek. "Not selling to Anarchs. You can stop wasting your time. Ms. Woeburne wouldn't be caught dead." Lily's hands were balled at her hips. She shoved past Knox's angular shoulder and stood up. Her spine racked, winding the tendons, a too-straight ache. "Trust me on this one."

"Hold the phone. How do you even know this bitch? I thought you said you were—" She cut him off.

"That is none of your business. I just do. I used to. Look, it was a long time ago, so leave it alone. Believe me; I know her well enough to tell you that this person would never dream of screwing with the Camarilla like that. You're wasting your time," she swore again, aggressive, nausea stinging, false-insides. Tender resentments moldered in the fledgling's gut. _Is it your fault?_ asked a small voice. _Is it you?_

There was nothing she could do. There was no reason to think about it. Ms. Woeburne wouldn't have thought twice. But the self-exoneration of _couldn't-have-known_ isn't fulfilling. Lily was terrified of Ms. Woeburne. Some Anarchs and some bad choices had given her reason to be.

But a piece of her sickened at the prospect of having pulled down that soldier's little flag.

_'Should have stayed out of it.'_ She seared herself—again—for what felt like it would never be the very last time. _'I should have stayed out of this vampire shit.'_

Lilt felt immediately and irreversibly tired. She could have slept a week in this place. Instead, the Caitiff scraped all ten fingers over her cheekbones and puffed out one long, sluggish, lifeless breath. She didn't want to see out. She didn't want, didn't like, to talk about bosses or should-haves anymore.

Ms. Woeburne needs security. Ms. Woeburne needs time.

"Just wait, all right? Wait there," the Lily said—and Knox didn't press, didn't argue, tried not to follow her out. "I'm going to change into my PJs."

He moved to hit pause, or maybe to speak.

An alarm stopped them both.

**CIVIL ALERT** said:

 

* * *

 

**CIVIL ALERT**

**CIVIL ALERT**

**WE INTERRUPT YOUR SCHEDULED PROGRAMMING TO DELIVER AN EMERGENCY ACTION NOTIFICATION REQUESTED BY THE CALIFORNIA STATE POLICE DEPARTMENT. IMPORTANT INFORMATION WILL FOLLOW.**

**7/26 02:14: DUE TO AN ELEVATED TERROR THREAT LEVEL IN SANTA MONICA, ALL MAJOR INBOUND AND OUTBOUND HIGHWAYS ARE CLOSED INDEFINITELY. NATIONAL SECURITY FORCES IN THE AREA ASSURE RESIDENTS THAT THE SITUATION IS UNDER CONTROL AND NO IMMEDIATE DANGER IS PRESENT. AUTHORITIES NEVERTHELESS URGE CITIZENS TO REMAIN IN THEIR HOMES UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.**

**MESSAGE WILL REPEAT UNTIL REVOKED.**

**CIVIL ALERT**

**CIVIL ALERT**

 

* * *

 

The warning scrolled another two times before dropping to an angry blink on the blackness of screen.

"What? Hold on. _What_ ," the ghoul circled in on himself, a human redundancy, a need to have it asked, and hear somebody speak. Knox bounced forward on their furniture, eyebrows forking for his scraggly hairline. He stood up and sat down and stood up again. She lurched over the couch back for their remote and switched to a news station; there were anxious, exaggerated banners scrolling about _Destruction on Santa Monica Pier_. There were first-responders at the scene to stand outside of blockades and pretend to know more. There were somber-faced women who sat with coffee cups and argued in ties. There was a rush, a jumble; they said nothing to one another right away. They watched.

"Holy shit! That's the fucking Ferris wheel! I better—I don't know. I better get Bertram. Call him or something. Oh, man. Santa Monica. Boss is going to be pissed. He's going to need me to work."

Lily watched a moustached anchorman drone concernedly at her; she let images of burning carousel ponies flash by in neat little boxes, distant but close. Carnival flags lit fire and flittered dismally into dark, thin air. The thin-blood swallowed, feeling faint.

"Turn it down," she asked, not knowing what, not knowing why. "I'll be right back."

_Message will repeat._

"Crazy old world we live in, girlfriend," Knox sighed, saw Lily turn away, and twisted the volume all the way up.


	52. Wandering Soul

Venture Tower was exactly what Eugene Walker expected: officious, deco-Roman, bitter black-on-white.

"Look at this. Look at what has wandered in. Another thin-blood?" asked the lobby receptionist—face gorgeous, body cold, telephone hanging, somehow not asking him at all. She glanced E a condescending head-to-toe. "Come up front, please! You really must. Let's see what the story is."

Not that there was much to see of the man who stepped forward, reluctant obedience. His story was a commonplace one: plain look, poorly-fitting jeans, slouching tennis shoes, slicked-back ginger over a bony, forgettable profile. And it went without saying that the Caitiff's general aura of lostness did not impress a haute couture Toreador. She was not paid enough to find out who had sent him in.

E inched closer, crablike, obviously lacking a legitimate reason to waltz through a Prince's headquarters. Chut; she was not unreasonable. The woman gave one exquisite sigh before bidding farewell to Line Three and setting down the black receiver.

"Hi. Hello. Good evening," was E's best try, his hopes overlooking the vicious quality of those dismissive, painted eyes. Her expression was thin. Dramatic shadow flared around catty, reddish brown. He did not have a reference. What E had was mistrust—a dislike of power, discomfort around large animals, and a resentment for beauty that he thought was not real. What he had was the lingering, reactionary fear of umbrella governments and small people. What he had was a vague hope and a tight stomach; when he was alive, E had been nervous around big dogs and pushy women. There is something about these carnivores. There are very few things that would nudge him into this monolith of obsidian and steel.

Lily was the first of them. Smoldered auto parts and bullet casings washing onto their castaway beach was another.

"Hi, there," the Caitiff tried again, forcing a smile through the crunch of anxiety. E pushed both hands into his pants pockets. Lukewarm acid burbled in the pit of his gut. "Sorry to bother you. I'm here to speak with Woeburne. Ms. Woeburne," he added; the woman at the counter did not budge. "I don't know if she's in now. I can come back."

The name seemed to gain her interest, but only marginally. It was a briefer and more brittle attention than glimpses given by sleepy Siamese cats—long muzzles and lovely, wicked pupils, grace that offset how they crossed. His nerve endings felt snarled up. E had been afraid of dogs; he gave mammals a wide-berth; he'd never been a fan of cats.

"How curious you would want to speak to Ms. Woeburne," she decided. He didn't know why. The only thing to do was shrug and slyly shake it off. "May I, before anything else, wonder why?"

And then it was that E realized he had no alibi, and no real reasoning behind this mad move for a name they both knew. His mind raced like a rat with its teeth out. Each scuttle or flick made that feline nose _twitch_. "Nothing too interesting. Personal issues. Usually we'd meet on our own time, schedule something. Just everyday work. But I know she's an employee of some standing here, so I'd really appreciate you patching me through. I'm a..." ("Friend" would waste a perfectly good lie.) "I'm a business associate."

Thinly-tweezed eyebrows rose over the buttery, rouged cheeks. She was unnaturally ravishing, gallingly domestic. And very, very _scarlet_.

"I doubt that highly," the woman said, pretty lids crinkling. Her gentleness was insulting. She swept out a patronizing smile for him; before E could think of protesting, Joelle had already put-putted her desk chair away and was typing up a memo on the callous company PC.

Bare teeth, filed claws, coats that taunt with their softness, a fast bite. These are the arsenal of predators. A cat could pick up one comely paw and swat pestering little things long before its supper came. When you are a small fish, you'd be better off boring it than letting those whiskers bristle curiously forward, those nails extend, and each velvet ear turn to point at you.

"Well, she's a client, to be specific," was E's saving grace. Composure is all a prey animal has. Play it calm, shuffle slowly, and your dullness might convince big hunters to pass on. A modest grin fought back against her lofty one.

"Oh, no," the vampire disagreed, a tut of her tongue, the most powder-room _denied_ there is. "Forgive me, so sorry: but that couldn't possibly be the way of it. Far more likely that _you_ are a client of _hers_. And it is still very, very unlikely." She said _no_ in a way that would send you running. It was allure, yes, but a malicious, malignant blood-type; you could feel its needles _pip, squish,_ poke through the fat of your most vulnerable places. Minnows go down in a crunch, crunch, gulp. "But if a Foundation representative no longer desires your 'business'—why, then, dear sir, it isn't _my_ business to interfere. That is just the way commerce is sometimes. There are no hard feelings, I'm su—"

"Can I be straightforward with you? I'm on a job for her at the moment. Nothing to worry about—just something I know she's been waiting on. Rub is that I can't seem to get through at her home phone. Here's where I've been calling." He fished out, flattened and passed over a slip of post-it paper with Ms. Woeburne's cellular printed neatly across the top. The black enamel smelled frightfully of bleach. She was offended at having been interrupted; E wasn't sure how he knew, because the woman, skeptical and placid, hadn't said anything else at all. "You can give her my name if it'll help. It's Harris," he lied, sort of. "Eugene Harris."

He was afraid of being unremembered. His was not a letter that stuck.

She paid him very little mind. It is an understood fact that Kindred won't register you; you're two very different levels on a ladder; these are the divisions that will get you killed. The longer he talked to her, the worse this surreal sensation of doom got. He could feel it—pounds of something like wet, mossy dirt—what Rosie called _the Jihad_?—shoveling higher and higher, making him faint. A handful of sentences in, and the weight was asphyxiating. He tried to breathe and felt dizzy off chemicals. Everything was evil, and in-place, and too clean.

Including the woman before him—who twisted around, ignored his suggestion, and shut him short with her piercing squint. E's hand retracted from the only shred of proof he had. It was only a telephone number—digits in pencil, barely a thread. He might as well have been a beetle under microscope. His legs tried, and failed, to crawl away.

"Well, _Eugene Harris_ , on any other day I would certainly do this little thing for you," she soothed, blinking at him, mildness that belittled more than it offered to help. The monitor glow turned her crimson lipstick a gangrene, deep-bruise purple. Now half of his name was a lie. "But tonight, I'm afraid it would be impossible."

E waited for her to elaborate; she did not. He was getting irritated, but mostly felt dismayed, watching Venture Tower's sentry return to her keyboard with no more concern left to spare. "Why?" the thin-blood asked, struggling to keep his face straight. The square of paper—the only evidence of his valid but flimsy connection to Ms. Woeburne—was creased, once, and dropped into a nearby trash can.

Manicured hands fluttered, leapt the ruby lapels, and landed neatly upon her breastbone. "Why—because, monsieur, she is not here."

"She isn't? Where is she?" E forgot his back-story. There was a sudden, upended crack in his voice; he groped to regain a safe middle-measure.

The vampire did not bother looking at him this time. Her hands were on her keyboard. The tendons in those long fingers gave one tiny, hostile, threatening jump.

"I mean," the Caitiff fumbled, arguing when it seemed impossible for him to talk. "That's no real problem. It's that she didn't tell me, is all. If you'd be kind enough to let me know where I can reach her, I'll just set this up at Ms. Woeburne's convenience. Actually, you know—here's a better idea. You probably can't be handing out numbers to some guy off the street. But you could tell her to call me the next time she comes in. It doesn't have to be this evening."

"No, dear sir. Pardon. I am afraid we have misunderstood one another. A meeting will not be possible. You see, it is not simply that your—so sorry—your associate," she quoted, a mean little laugh, not bothering to hide behind the three fingertips across that flawless mouth. "Isn't _here_ in our building. No, of course not. You will not be able to see her because she has left Los Angeles, monsieur. Now." A spiteful bat of mascara, butterfly lashes. Both hands, smelling of jasmine, folded themselves beneath her chin. It was a dreamy, mocking way to be flippant. This vivacity is the terrible kind. "Is there anything that I can do for you in the meantime? If not, I am sure you can see yourself out, no? Good night, Mister Harris."

E's belly clenched, and the adrenaline was like salt blocks, fizzing away at whatever organs still worked. It tasted like good old-fashioned stage-fright; it made his danger-senses scream. "Left?" he heard himself repeat. "Left to where? When will she be back? She _will_ be back...?"

He saw the vampire's shoulders stiffen. Her demeaning, secretarial smile fell to neutral, and then—there's the danger—annoyed. "Monsieur, I think you already know I am not at liberty to tell you that." Her pinky hovered over the enter key. Between the first answer and the second, she plucked out a curt smattering of typeface, interest waning, until his voice was nothing but a pale afterthought noise. "As to your next question: I cannot tell you this, either, as I do not know. Business is always touch-and-go for us. So regretful that I cannot be of more help. But I imagine she will away for some time. Call it a professional hunch." One lightning-fast, provocative wink.

Anger in E's muscles—all of them, every one, from the cushion beneath his jowls to the arches of both feet. His knees locked inside his pant legs; frustration boiled up. The thin-blood's mouth compacted into a furious point before better sense smoothed it out. _Out of where? It doesn't matter. He is always having to get out of something._

E sucked in a breath of chilly air to fortify him. It tasted of conditioning and the sterility of lemon cleaner. He leant forward on the welcome desk, forcibly informal, and gritted out his most amicable voice. "Listen. I hate to put you in an awkward position. I really don't mean to cause any trouble for you, Miss…?"

"Joelle," she cooed, brisk and uncaring. Three whacks of a spacebar and the Toreador was tipping away.

"Joelle. But I really do need to speak with Ms. Woeburne. Just for a minute, that's all. I'd be grateful for anything you could do for me. Anything at all. I know I'm asking you to go out on a limb, here, but it's the only limb I've got. And if you could help me—only to figure out where she's gone, nothing else—even just slide me a hint..."

Joelle's head titled away from him. The anesthetic light of that machine did something to her face. It sharpened the cosmetics, turned the caramel chiffon green, demonized her elegant neck. "Nowhere you would be able to follow, I am sure."

For a heart-sinking moment, E thought Ms. Woeburne was dead.

But then she threw a line. It was gamey, soggy bait on a rusty old hook. Still, it was more than he had:

"Flying is so tricky for us, no? We sympathize, and the LaCroix Foundation apologizes for any inconvenience our business may have caused you. However, I am afraid that—for now—you will have to be patient. That is all I am pleased to say. Enjoy the rest of your evening, sir."

"I'm not asking for your firstborn child, here." E tried to joke, but it goaded him, made the desperation scuttle across his face, and she saw it. She must have. There comes a point of crumbling. There comes a minute when you can't fake the friendliness anymore. "I just—"

"With every respect, monsieur, I am very busy at the moment." Joelle's ultimatum was as clear as her small, inhospitable, unpoignant sigh. The vampire's fingers never left their home keys. "As such, I would like to avoid wasting our valuable time by paging security to escort you outside, but one does what one must. You understand, yes? Yes."

She smiled at him. What choice did he have?

"Good night, Mister Harris," Joelle Lefevre called. "Bonne chance. I hope you find what it is you are looking for."

 _I hope_ at his back is a kitty-cat yowl.


	53. Geography

**TO: RODERICK DUNN**   
**FROM: S WOEBURNE**   
**DATE: SEPTEMBER 5 2010 3:32 AM**   
**SUBJECT: GEOGRAPHICAL UPDATE**

 

Roderick et al.:

 

This notice is to inform you of an ongoing situation. Due to a recent reprioritization initiative in Los Angeles, I expect to be temporarily without Domain. This is a short-term arrangement only. I am being relocated without delay.

My next posting is confidential at this time.

Adjust my contact information and expected availability accordingly. I haven’t received a regular status update from Hendon in some time. If there are any pressing questions or concerns, I can field them within the next thirty-six hours. Afterwards, you’re on your own.

Take advantage of it now if you’re planning on a response. Cannot stress this enough. It might be a while.

Discontinue mail to my Los Angeles office upon receipt of this message. You may continue to forward digital correspondence to my Foundation e-mail address. If and when I establish a secure post and am ready to receive correspondence, I’ll alert you.

For now, please hold all physical documents. I will have to see them when I return.

Until then.

 

S WOEBURNE  
LACROIX FOUNDATION  
FIELD AGENT


	54. Business Class Exile

It was massive, chrome, and ungainly. It escaped most of Ms. Woeburne's vocabulary. It was sitting obtusely in a concrete court of Astroturf and diesel tracks, and it was underscored by the scent of seagull meat rotting in lake water.

It was, for all intents and purposes, a bean.

_'You know. I don't claim it,'_ the Foreman mused, frowning, searching out a glimmer of black suit in the thing's reflection. She couldn't find herself, and this had nothing to do with being undead. _'I don't claim to be a Toreador. There is art I should appreciate that I don't. But given that, I have no idea—no idea—why someone drops a monster legume in the middle of an otherwise perfectly good city park. All that mob money, and this is what they do with it? 'Cloud Gate.' My supercilious Ventrue ass.'_

If this is high art in Midwest America, the Foreman was satisfied with her status as a corporate troglodyte.

She stared at the lump a moment longer before enough was enough, and—shaking her head, feeling a little better having criticized something—Ms. Woeburne shouldered her bag to move on.

Miles away from the tumult of Los Angeles and you still could not find a slice of real peace. This modest pedestrian path she'd put herself on seemed cramped for being so late; it cobbled through what little August had left of Millennium Park's flower gardens, more ivy than petals, burnt leaves in the trees. Someone ate a meat sandwich; someone else reeked of alcohol. She didn't enjoy either smell, and so the woman pushed farther away from this well-lit main square, leaving the nighttime trickle off Michigan Avenue behind her. She went somewhere less conspicuous with cicadas and car engines at her back. It was just as well, anyway. Ms. Woeburne didn't believe in quiet walks—didn't believe that they'd help you heal, or clear your head—but she did believe in being alone.

It was late. All these fountains and light shows and niceties had been shut off. The city nudged and shoved and squawked in the pidgin of horns. They are all the same sort of beast, you know—cities are. Despite how fiercely they claim greatness, and swear how old their statues are. If she were to tune out the aromas and accents and this stuffy modern architecture, the unwanted Ventrue could easily pretend to be in California again. There were all the beeps, the oil fumes, the sound of water on sand. Strain a bit. Meditate (though she didn't believe in that, either)—and it might as well have been London, New York, a townhome in Leeds.

Her stout-heeled shoes became the primary noise as the Ventrue moved away. Ms. Woeburne dodged a beachbound cyclist and climbed the wide silver snake of an aluminum bridge, ignoring its spinal-cord artiness, until most of the park was lain out beneath her and she could see sailboats in the distance. It was a good place to watch. There came, just then, a nice freshwater breeze, rolling off the lake, thick with gasoline and shoal. To the east: massive oceanic blue. She stopped at the middle point and leant both elbows on the metal banister, looking down at the heave of taxis, buses, joggers, red lights stuck on oblivious cars. Though it was night, the metal felt hot beneath S.W.'s bare fingers, something that made no sense. She put her sleeves over it. She swatted a mosquito. She tried to be content.

Ms. Woeburne told herself, as she always did, that it wasn't so bad as it seemed.

The Foreman was not sent here for sightseeing. She focused, a _finder_ among people who merely looked—looked for things to talk to, to take pictures of, to eat. The contempt growing in her for such people frightened Ms. Woeburne. It had not been so long ago. Or maybe it had been. Maybe inhumanity only needs a decade or three to husk a thing, to shake the first soul away, make it different than what she currently was. Who's to say if the resentment of predators for their prey is ever justified. It makes a convenient excuse for what has to be done to them. It makes a Darwin kind of sense.

Chicago had not been entirely welcoming.

The local hierarchy apparently didn't have time for her. Ms. Woeburne met briefly with the stooge they'd appointed Seneschal; she'd forgotten his first name. He was your typical turgid Tremere bastard with more self-esteem beneath his belt than genuine achievements, ego bloated with cantrips and dissertations. S.W. politely thanked him for receiving her and promised to operate with good manners and discretion in their transitioning Domain.

Ancillae (especially banished ones) shouldn't expect much courtesy from a foreign Domain, no, but Ms. Woeburne got none. _None_ is a distressing figure for one scam-buried agent whose Prince had just steamily declared he could no longer stomach her "insipid, colorless face" puttering about his tower.

She'd made no attempt to deceive him. Oh, no; she wouldn't make that mistake again. He'd anticipated her self-preservation instinct, anyway. Or maybe the real word here is _commoditized_ —he had made her fear into something useful to him.

Fear makes an awfully convincing I'm-telling-you-the-truth face.

It doesn't matter if sinking-ship syndrome is the universal nature of young Ventrue or mostly her own. LaCroix had predicted that a panicked Foreman would preserve Camarilla good intentions second only to her life, especially when she was balancing there on the stepping stool's edge, her neck in a noose. Who knew how he'd learned that himself. And, not to put too fine a point on it: who cared? The man who'd made Ms. Woeburne into this soldier, this new thing, had even foreseen the most lowly and embarrassing part. He'd just figured that, on the off-chance she was not murdered—in the unlikely scenario where he would not have a reason to execute her for crimes she did not commit—S.W. would come scrambling back to him like some feudal lord's birder, like a hunting lion on a chain.

The Prince was unimpressed to find her on his way out of Giovanni Mansion, sitting in a stolen car, composure closer to tatters than the dress she wore. For all that he'd guessed what she'd do, Mr. LaCroix wasn't one for to just forgive you lickety-split like that.

It was a moderate punishment, really—a psychological penance—a soft, productive exile.

It was an eight o'clock ticket into O'Hare. It was prepaid for one person. It was business class.

It was not roundtrip.

Ms. Woeburne had not needed a lecture to know she was in deep shit.

To say that she'd gone "scrambling back" was misleading, because her driving had never been as cool-headed as it was in the aftermath of that misstep. She disrespected no turn signals and rolled through no stop signs. And when Giovanni Manor reappeared through the thick late summer smog, there was no limping out, dignity dragging, dog-whimpering for his help. There was no neatly squeaking into their valet lot. Instead, the Foreman had parked under the dark leaves of a Valencia orange tree and did not leave her car. Ms. Woeburne felt a bigger trouble coming, surely as it had upon that pier. She would not risk a bad entrance. This could not be quick-fixed. These shred marks couldn't be scoured off with steaming water and bar soap in an arcade bathroom, no matter how hard her hands had worked.

So S.W. merely stopped. She waited in that unlit passenger car, kneecaps dotted with road-rash and pressed together, until the crowd filtered into warm summer darkness. Not an hour passed before out came Prince LaCroix.

He was easy to spot in his pristine suit. She opened the door, walked to his limousine, and waited with the grim look of a boxer who had lost her priciest fight.

The Foreman had used these inadequate forty-five minutes to map out what she might say to appease him. It was not enough time to be persuasive or eloquent. Lying to an older Ventrue is a poor option; their progeny know this best, the product of experience, and of being constantly baited to stick their pinkies in the velvet cake, just to see if they would. At best, attempting to mislead him would be a dim-witted waste of time; at worst, it could kill her. A concise, factual account was her best course of action. It was the safest route, albeit still not very safe at all. S.W. realized that he was quite possibly already informed. She'd prepared for the possibility that Mr. LaCroix would tell _her_ what had really happened.

She was considerably less prepared for the slap in the mouth.

Peeling over a jumble of excuses, stunned into silence, Ms. Woeburne's fingers clung dumbly to her hit chin while Sebastian wrenched open his car door and coldly pushed them both in. She couldn't believe it had happened. She buckled her seat belt and sat.

Strange that this insignificant _pop_ did not hurt. It did not hurt her—he could not really do so with his bare hands—but it was louder, somehow, than it should have been. S.W. was staring, struck stupid, at the silver buttons on the Prince's crisp jacket, palm attached to her swollen bottom lip. _Did he really? Really_ , she wondered, but could not finish the thought.

It was an archaic way to treat a person. One you did not encounter these days, and one the Foreman had never expected to tolerate from him. Ms. Woeburne's world condensed to avoid the contemptuous iolite of a Prince glaring at her. Two pairs of pricey black shoes faced each other on the limousine carpet. Her messed hair cut her sight into fractions as she gummed on words that never quite formed.

LaCroix glowered at the hobbling attempt to make something up. She could take the rest of the night if she pleased. Days, perhaps, if the child was so inclined to _sit there_ , thick-tongued, a club-footed toddler in a ragged gown. The insult made his mouth twitch at its precision. He had never been so disappointed with Ms. Woeburne. Not even that time she failed to pay a Hendon Harpy his protection fee.

"Tell me something, Ms. Woeburne," Mr. LaCroix began, turning the question thoughtfully, like one might a pretentious piece of chocolate. His voice was a windless night at sea. "Do you know what I find the most disappointing about you?"

She blinked at him like a slaughterhouse cow.

"It's not that I'm surprised. I understood you'd scuttle off to Santa Monica once you smelled your own blood in the air. And I don't fault you for it. It's your nature. It is our nature to try and control what lesser peoples, lower peoples, leave to fate. You are Ventrue," LaCroix reminded her, needlessly. He rolled his thumb and forefinger together; Ms. Woeburne waited for a strike of flame. "Contingencies were in place had you failed, of course. But I think you ought to be flattered. Flattered because—despite your limitations, which, lately, are _severe_ —I thought you'd perform well. I thought you'd be the best end to this running joke. And, the whole long while, I was here, ready to bring you back and let you eat the harvest you sewed when you lied to me, and when you decided your own business was more important than ours. But, seeing as you haven't been killed—which would have suited my plans just fine—I can only assume you've done the lucky thing, and managed to eat yourself all the way through. So."

_So_ —it's a horrible segue, a terrible omen, a very cruel way to make good on a threat.

"Twice I'm right: about you, and about the politics you've tried—so poorly—to play. And! And, in spite of your atrocious decisions, and all the chewed-up birds you've brought back to this doorstep, who came out ahead of you? Whose business survived." He did not wait for her to answer. "While we're at it—let's not beat around the bush—why not go another step? Suppose we say your incompetence has actually helped my cause. All these fumblings, all these errors in judgment that I knew you'd make. I knew you'd end up here from that first foolish step you took off my stoop. Appreciate that. Appreciate that, in the face of everything you've done against what you _thought_ were my instructions, we are still here. You were either going to be the hero or the villain in this, Ms. Woeburne; if it looks like you might come out the hero tonight, that is only because of a fluke chance, and the Brujah proclivity to believe a lie. But please, by all means, be a hero. It's well and good; it doesn't matter to me. I fully thought I'd have to see you wrung out for this. I thought you'd be taking this responsibility to the grave. I should be happy. And yet I am _not_ happy. Do you know why?"

"Me! I didn't do this because I wanted to be a—? You saw the reports. I gave everything to you. You didn't leave me any choi—" He smacked her again. Ms. Woeburne did not bother touching it this time. She leant swiftly back into the chair, lead-tongued, furious, nerves stinging wildly up and down either cheek.

Mr. LaCroix snorted fiercely—he almost laughed—it was a livid, snarling sound. His look was one riflers wear while scraping dirt from the treads of their boots. "Do not spittle excuses while I am speaking, child, or you can trudge home in the sunlight."

Ms. Woeburne disarmed. Her head turned aside to clear a blow she expected but that didn't come.

"It baffles me," he spat, "that some pocket of your mind thinks it can operate alone. You are my Childe, you straw-man of a girl. You did exactly as I thought you would. Dull little stone. You are always so desperate for a pat on the head," he observed, and she was in no position, stiff-backed and blanched, to hate him for it. "You are the polar opposite of extraordinary. You were chosen _because_ you are not extraordinary. That is your place. Fill it or do not."

She might have said many things. But she said none.

"You have no stature to protect. You have no Domain. You are not a dauphin to fret over my favor against blood cousins. You are a corporal," said the Prince. "First you serve."

Ms. Woeburne wants to be correct. She wants to be correct in her accounts, and she wants you to have a correct idea of what this was, that's all. Maybe it was the need to be correct that makes the corporal hurt, then. She wanted to say she'd been 'serving' since she had been acquired—but sometimes service is biting everything back.

S.W. was practiced in the smart kind of silence; she knew how to bow her head toward her collarbone and chew on the tip of her punitive tongue. The Ventrue's nails were digging into her elbows unconsciously, worrying the skin. Correctness didn't bear thinking about. Why bother, you have to think sometimes. What's the use of planning out a hundred different scenarios for a hundred different situations when every one felt like—one night, far in her future or maybe too soon—it was all leading here?

Planning is just what Ms. Woeburne does. But she could not stomach it right now. If he killed her, then he killed her, and that would be the end of worrying about anything.

But he'd included a job description—the one tidbit that kept her from deciding yes, it was no use, her egg-timer had just chimed _done._

"I'd thought that you, of all people, would have the court exposure to realize our Board won't tolerate this sort of ineptitude. No longer will I." The limousine navigated Main Street. Downtown rose around them, rectangular and threatening, a dense American grid of concrete. It had been the single longest car ride of Ms. Woeburne's life. She weathered it like a bomber does—mutely, compact, mouthed yeses and dim half-nods. "I see now that my flaw in your tutelage has been sparing the rod, hoping you might eventually take something valuable your mistakes. So, for you, I have one last piece of advice: Do not expect my forgiveness. In fact, do not 'expect' at all. What you can count on is that here on out I demand the respect due to a Sire from a Childe. Do I make myself clear?"

She nodded.

"Good. I should like you to figure it out," he chuffed, something stung terribly for some reason. You could hear the authoritarian click of his canines. She clung dismally to a missing slice of dress above her ribs. "For now, however, I would like you to go."

For all the anger, for all its unfairness, she was rattled at how badly the rejection burned. Victor de Luca had been an unimaginative, unlicensed heel-kisser—but had he ever disappointed his Prince so thoroughly? Had he done anything wrong in his measly lackey's life? Had Sebastian ever smarted the neonate's face with his palm? Ms. Woeburne felt a tepid, bullying surge of stickiness well; her vision began to blur. She panicked. _'No. No, no. For God's sake, not here.'_

Cold composure fought against her tear ducts. She stiffened her nose, clenched her fists and hit her tongue harder, frantic for something to denigrate, something to make this seem not so bad.

"I cannot have you here right now. I won't risk it. Neither can you—presuming your gamble plays out well, and you want to outlive this. You will be relocated. You will be sent to Chicago until further notice," he told her. The terse list of Yous caught Ms. Woeburne off guard. The self-pity retreated, withering back into the depths from which feeble things like weeping and weakness came. Her compulsion to cry was replaced by the deadness that comes with being suddenly unsure. "There, you will meet with an antiquities expert on my behalf and discuss the purchase of his services. I will provide you with the tools you need. Is this understood?"

She nodded.

"You will do whatever he asks as though I had asked it, and you will do it well. Is this understood?"

She nodded.

"You will not leave that Domain unless I am preemptively made aware of it. When I decide that you have redeemed yourself, and that the situation has settled, I will send someone to fetch you," Mr. LaCroix informed her, frown roasting through a printless passenger window. The word 'fetch' flicked past his incisors with condescension. It hit her ego like a golf swing. "Until then, do not let me catch a whiff of you in my business, or in my city. Is this understood?"

She meant to nod again—she did—but the omen of what must be understood distracted S.W. There was a rising scent of rainwater on blacktop. Mr. LaCroix said nothing more to Ms. Woeburne—merely tilted back and stared towards the skyline, lights in an inkspill—the irritation of her was a monochrome, genderless static inside something female. The Foreman was not about to disturb him. She looked at her ankles, both twisted, now swelling. Aching ribs, sore shinbones, tingling hamstrings, kicked caps. Musket-hole smelling of garlic and struggling to heal in the paleness of a calf. Crumpled fingers, broken nose; teeth in the plum of her throat on an Anarch's basement floor. They were all the same distraction and all the same childish rage.

She had been so diligently considering her injured feet that Ms. Woeburne did not notice when the car stopped. It was Mr. LaCroix's cough that picked up her head to face the broad brick home—no, not-home—of Empire Hotel.

"Go," he said. She did not look up at him. It was "go" only.

Without looking, without speaking, she unbuckled herself and moved to leave—but before Ms. Woeburne could escape, Sebastian caught her. He did not suddenly think of something important. He did not grasp her arm. As she placed one foot on that familiar curb, the Prince seized a fistful of his protégé's black felt collar, yanking her back to face him. She staggered, half-seated and half-standing, eyes level with her Elder. It was like looking into salt water and hurt the bitter grape-skin of her own. Both sharp, both cruel, both Ventrue, and there is no one who understands more what seeing into another Ventrue's pupil might do to your head.

"Don't," she begged him, sullenly, flinching, because she did not want to look. "Don't. Don't, please."

"If you expect your freedom from me, listen. Do not forget yourself again. I couldn't care less _who_ you seem to think you are. Be what you are. You are a Prince's Childe," LaCroix seared. "It is high time you start seeing like one."

And he released her, turning crossly, leaving the Foreman with a plane ticket in one hand and no idea where she ought to go.

"And Ms. Woeburne," Prince LaCroix warned, calling after her with all his fingers wrapped around the door handle. "If you disappoint me again, don't bother coming back."

_Slam_.

She watched his limousine leave, and like a bit in her mouth came the need to scream.

Lo and behold: here S. Woeburne was.

Her "expert" was late. But the weather was comfortable and her body was whole, two things you oughtn't take for granted in the United States. She would like to have been allowed to settle again, Ms. Woeburne thought, standing on that bridge, letting the aluminum cool her armbones and feeling, wincing quietly, the bullet sting in her still unhealed leg.

She looked at the face of her cell phone. There was nothing to suggest the man she came here to meet remembered her. Since S.W. left LA, Mr. LaCroix changed her number, closed her extra company accounts, and mailed her a new set of IDs. The micromanaging was more than irksome. It lifted tensions like fine hairs up the back of her neck.

Over these past few weeks, Ms. Woeburne had nursed a suspicion that Sebastian was still using her indiscretions to his tactical advantage. Or at least it had been made it look that way. One should never assume they know what lies at the end of a Ventrue's long-sight. And S.W. had no longing to ply some bureaucracy here; she did not care for the Americas. She had no desire, you know, to be dangled out on a meat hook before the Anarch Party, and there was nothing heroic about her—not to be poked at, not so to speak.

No, let's be honest with ourselves: she'd probably been stuck on this fishing pole for a while. Maybe the lure would to get soggy and fall off.

At least this district was safe. You know. Relatively.

Interestingly enough, the advisor Mr. LaCroix hoped to contract into his Antiquities Department was something of a wild card. Ms. Woeburne heard, mostly through rumor, that he'd arrived here six months ago intending to patch-up Chicago's Lupine woes. Perhaps this was why the local Camarilla's saluted him with outstretched arms while she was received by a tidy, over-important prick buttoned up in his best suit, sniffing at her to move along. Funny, that. Funny how the top cards tend to shuffle towards the bottom, and when the turn ends, they will do so face-down.

But you know, being shoved about by stodgy Elders didn't grief her much; you couldn't let it; and anyway, it wasn't as though stodginess had ever been a stranger to Ms. Woeburne's port of call.

Speaking of call.

Coolwater breeze rippled through her starchy black skirt; the informant was nowhere in sight. Moonlight glared off stark bridge sheeting. She did not recognize the number on her phone.

"Ms. Woeburne," Ms. Woeburne answered, free hand holding onto that broad safety partition between herself and the truck beds below. "LaCroix Foundation, Field Branch."

" _Field branch? What happened to London, senator?"_

S.W.'s teeth, small and orderly, bit down—hard. Acid in her gums; it hurt. She considered dial toning, and juggled the phone away to do so, but could not quite commit. She was now separated from this threat by miles of mountain and Great Plains. They were not close peoples. And they were not, she knew, not wanted—not satiable—not going away any time soon.

"How did you get this number?"

" _It wouldn't kill you,"_ he figured, _"to give us just a little credit."_

"Do you know. There is a saying about the Brujah in the East Coast, about what tends to happen in the West. Do you know this? We say it all the time. 'Stomp a roach,'" she said—you know, she really did say that—barren and broken-glass clear. "'Stomp a roach, and ten more will come scuttling out of the ground.' So it might have been vain of me, I think, to suppose we were done with this. Why are you calling? What do you want."

These are a Patrician's questions: what do you want, why have you done it, what are you going to do?

Perhaps he would have been right to leave it there, but he did not. Nothing wanted is ever as simple as _what_ , _why,_ and _from whom_.

_"You don't sound so good, Woeburne. Where are you?"_ the Baron asked, more than a touch facetious, but nobody ought to be expected to handle roach-squashing analogies with a nod and smile? _"Board meeting?"_

"It's not your business."

" _No, I think it is,"_ he begged to differ, deceptively polite, agree-to-disagree, and the façade of friendliness was paper-thin. _"Because I don't know if you're looking at it like me. But I just got shot, and it looks kind of suspicious, you think of it that way. You vanishing. Right from the scene. Some people, they might wonder that's a little off. I told them. I said: Maybe she just had something come up. Real quick. I said: Hey, we don't need to be making mountains out of molehills. I said what has this woman done in the past to make a jury of her peers think—"_

"Chicago. This is Camarilla trade. That's all I care to say." It was a hesitant and—if you'd not tell anyone else this—a slightly flabbergasted admission. Less than two nights ago, there'd been all that blood beneath her fingernails, water steaming in a bathroom sink. The Foreman stiffened, noticed she'd started to pace down this click-clack runway, and did not bother hiding her disdain. "As if it's any business of 'some people' whatsoever."

He ignored that. Normally this surfeit of passive aggression would've narked Ms. Woeburne. But she was too distracted to burn energy on Brujah psychological warfare. She is a representative, by anyone's measure; she remembered her badge, and, hearing a Free State voice, she looked, just a little anxiously, around. _"You are? Shit. You got to fit right in out there,"_ the Anarch guessed, and not kindly. _"You got to feel right at home. Why Chicago?"_

"Do you suppose that's likely."

_"It was worth a try."_

"Why are we speaking?" Beneath the glaze of politeness, she is usually in this sort of mood. There was an uncomfortable bite to the breeze all of a sudden, and the Ventrue wrapped one arm protectively around her abdomen. "As I said, I'm busy. I don't have the time or the patience to waste on trying."

He paused. _"Is that it for you? You coming back?"_

"I can't say."

" _Don't know, or can't say? This is more than a little worrying to me, Camarilla. I am full of shrapnel; I am in not a little bit of pain; and I am owed by you people an explanation why."_

"I," Ms. Woeburne told him, thinly, absolutely done. "Don't care. At all."

The Baron breathed hard out his nose.

" _You know,"_ he observed. _"I appreciate the Ventrue complex you've got going on, but it's not necessary to be a vile bitch one-hundred percent the time."_

"Excuse me. Is that your professional opinion? Are you telling me I need an _attitude_ adjustment?" She could feel cruelness peel across her face. Mockery with teeth. Ms. Woeburne's laughter is a contemptible and arrogant sound. "From you? From _I should rip your fucking head off_? From _take the tongue out of your mouth_? _I will kill you right here_...? _"_

" _I was calling to thank you, but hey, whatever."_ Rodriguez gave her five foot-eating seconds of silence before tossing in: _"It doesn't always have to be an episode between you and me."_

Ms. Woeburne was unsure. Confusion stumbled through the hubris. She tried to decide if she was being goaded. "Fine, then. Acknowledged. I acknowledge your grandstand. You're _so_ humble. Very impressed. And I assume—I really do hope—there's not a crosshair on my head anymore. It was not my fault. Not my call. You have no right to aggress against me; your people can't expect—"

_"They won't_. _Whatever I told you, you can pretend like it never was. That pier was a scene. I won't speak on the politics. There's no use. And I'm not going say I was wrong about you, because Santa Monica was a moment in time, London; when it comes down to it, I still don't think I am. That's just where I stand. But you came through,"_ the Brujah noted, not exactly complimentary, not wholly a grudge. She stilled herself and did not pace. _Thank you_ is a foreign, castrating sound. _"You have our gratitude. And I have to give you mine, too."_

Ms. Woeburne could taste the aggression disbanding in her throat. The fight instinct stepped back, and she felt mollified, and nothing imminently mean dawned to her to say.

"Oh," she figured. "Well. Yes. All right, then. I suppose you're welcome."

That's what one does when thanked. You're Welcome is still the appropriate response, isn't it? The words of it, though—the actual _saying_ —felt strange. They had a peculiar texture, roughage about them, one that was not entirely pleasant. There was another brief, uncomfortable intermission. _Thank you_ is a troublesome thing. It is like a gift from a disliked friend—something a good corporal does not often receive—should not need—ought not, conscionably, accept.

" _Good. I'm glad we made it through this conversation. Now that you mention, though, there is something else I thought of. Tell me what you'd say if I told you—"_

"Didn't I already tell you? I. Don't. Care."

_Click._

Yes. That was much better.

She pocketed the phone in time to face her objective: leather coat, adventurer's hat, mandarin eyes, disbelief.

"You must be Beckett," Ms. Woeburne said, and reached out to shake his hand.


	55. Ballistics

"Fucker tried to kill me," Nines snapped, closed his phone, and turned to the perpetual smirk of Isaac Abrams.

Baron Hollywood sat placidly at one end of a leather couch; the stare he wore tonight was made of false regrets and a thin side of concern. To tell you the truth, there's no bona fide fraternity between these two. They are two Anarchies that could never combine without breaking everything up. So you'll need to understand this going in: Abrams's concern, as it ought to be, is for the seat he holds—and any concern for Rodriguez the Toreador feels is because the Brujah's soldiers are important instruments in holding that seat. You need their kind of sweaty, angry trench power. Any grudge is tolerable when it keeps you off the guillotine. Anything can be forgiven to fill a battlefield with troops that aren't your own.

"I see that," Isaac noted, because it's good to agree with smaller voices about smaller things, and because he couldn't ignore the bandages seeping beneath Baron Downtown's shirt. It had been a little too close for the both of them. It didn't mean any part of this relationship would change. "Well, he got his just deserts. Maybe the Bible-thumping son-of-a-bitch died. That lands the Society something else to brood over, anyway, apart from burning us down."

Nines's look hardened, squarish mouth thinning. "Not Bach," he grunted, annoyed by the intentional misunderstanding. His eyes narrowed into hateful tough-guy squints. "Venture. They engineered this whole thing—gave us a feint, set us up to take a nose-dive. I know it."

It's a simple act. The grandstanding of veteran Brujah—those few Brujah, that is, who are clever enough and persuasive enough to hit middle-age—makes a nice protagonist to motivate the younger, stupider ones. Children like the children they have in LA are difficult to mobilize, if you're not that sort of veteran. They won't stop screaming long enough to hear from a Toreador—even a likeable one—even when that Toreador is the only Baron in America whose territory still stands on both its feet. Better give them a revolutionary, instead. Give them someone wronged, straight-talking, who goes on about things like brotherhood and resistance and what your rights are, rights that nobody can, supposedly, take away.

That performance had been working for Rodriguez many years before Sebastian LaCroix marched into California to make a Camarilla Court from a Free-State tribe. Then suddenly he wasn't a power-player anymore—suddenly his resources dissolved; suddenly he couldn't bully anyone; suddenly he was dead-in-the-water without the backing of a less warlike man. It set the stage for a convenient arrangement: Isaac provided funding, so long as Nines positioned his armies to keep Hollywood clean. A convenient arrangement, and a great show, too: one last Anarch poster-child rallying the cry while sharks circled, and bided their time.

A risky asset; you had to keep an eye on him. Brujah don't scheme like Ventrue do—they aren't smart enough to do like the Ventrue do—but they can be cunning, and they won't trust anybody else. You had to keep his excesses under control. You couldn't let him into your courtroom. But you could send provisions and encourage him from afar. Abrams's job, in the aftermath, was easy. It's easy to spin a deseated warlord into a recruitment voice for you. He only had to make sure Nines didn't die and he didn't climb back in that seat.

"That could be," Isaac agreed. He was kicked back against the chenille, gray suit sleeves unbuttoned, looking languid, and like he might be thinking about something else. "I won't tell you it's not. And I wouldn't put it past LaCroix. It's just like a wind-up charlatan to extend a handshake and deal a sucker-punch. Fits his character. But here's the breaks, kid: There's no evidence he's involved. Until you get some, and get it good, I can't imagine how you'd be able to prove it."

Baron Hollywood is going to survive this faction war, as he'd survived many of them before. With politicians like Abrams, opposition to the Camarilla is always about personal maneuverability, whether your interests are about ancient biological feuds or more libertarian in nature. Isaac's distinct advantage is that he's the latter sort of free-man. He's been making his own money and playing his own strategies for since day one, amigo; he doesn't need an advisor. He does not need a partner. Hell, if things go on like they've been—if LaCroix keeps offending his own officers, and Rodriguez keeps grabbing them up; if a knocked-out Baron can stay alive—then the Brujah might win Isaac a freebie shot at West California in a decade or two. It's a lot of 'if's. But it's also nothing new. This one's a contrived history play he'd directed countless times during the expanse of his career.

Failing that, the Brujah would buy time for Hollywood, at any rate. At least until an understanding could be reached between Baron Abrams and the baby-faced Prince, and a bargain could be made.

"I'm not trying to prove it. Hunters. Shit. When do hunters need an ulterior motive to start shooting in LA? We'd never get a hearing. But I'm not going to sit down and take it. I'm not going to let them third-party fire at me. I'm not going to tolerate—"

The snarl faltered. Whatever Nines wasn't going to tolerate had pulled open some scabs, loosened the laceration that drew his left temple to his hairline. It made him wince suddenly, in a way he wasn't able to hide. The dramatic amber light of Abrams Jewelry's private office was uncomfortable; it made everything a general, cottony sting.

Most of the superficial damage had knitted back together. The shrapnel holes, however—the deep, gory dents speckling his lower back—had not, and would not for a while. Shallower, now, and less frightening, but hideous, and they hurt. They were a fuzzy, constant ache through the surrounding abdomen; phosphorous had stunted the regeneration, cauterizing old flesh. Occasionally Nines might stretch the wrong way, and fresh blood would ooze through two sheets of dressing and stain his clothes. It itched like fire, like pine branches against new skin. Mid-mornings were when they irritated him most; he'd never been a stomach-sleeper, and would drowsily turn over, jolting awake, full of malingering potholes, cussing his voice hoarse.

And you can imagine what Damsel said.

Doughie had been a fringe member of the LA Den, still freshman status, and was missed mostly as an addendum. The Den Mother got more upset than Rodriguez expected over Skelter's death, though. Losing his officer was a personal insult; he put knuckles through his drywall in the solitude of that dingy apartment, one of those private, pointless swings that don't make any sense but you have to take. The choke of cement only flared more anger because Nines immediately realized he'd have to plaster over his crumbling fist-print. It was a stupid thing to do.

He would remember Skelter for a while; he'd glance to the empty spot beside a worn-down door and get mad about the waste. But that was the best Baron LA could offer. Poor kid. There had been a dozen loyal old guards and maybe a hundred downed soldiers since the last king was kicked off his hill—somehow, they were all poor kids.

Except for Smiling Jack. Jack's eulogy went something like: _"Saw that coming. Patriot shot down in the dirt like a big dirty goddamn patriot; saw it coming a million miles away. There's your war glory for you, buddy-boy. Soldiers get killed. We didn't invent that."_ He'd sighed cigar smoke, had a headshake and something that smacked of satire. _"Ah, well. Black guy always dies."_ Made a tap-tap on the bar with his knuckles. Made Nines stare across the den, blank look going white. Made a memory hiccup out of nowhere: some slick-shit, jelly-gut capo, ghoul of Rochelle's, who'd smoke at a typewriter, chuff _"Not dead yet, wetback?"_ _every time he walked in._ One more line on the list of why he couldn't fucking stand Smiling Jack. And one more reminder that there is nothing he can do about it but stand from the other side of a room and glare.

San Fran had come through, at least. Christie offered to stay put until their current—Nines just called it a "situation"—settled, and after Jack's told-you-so routine and another set of bandages, quietly asked if her Childe was needed here in a more longterm sense. It was a humbling offer, but he said no, because taking a last son is in bad taste. And he knew her own Den Mother's raggedy camp upstate was in sorrier shape than his own. They hopped a northbound train roundabout four hours ago; in the wake of what happened, he was sorry to see a couple more soldiers go.

"You're probably right," Abrams conceded, his tone more appropriate for a football game.

Isaac was a real laissez-faire man. It left a strange haze around him, a languidness and an ego, like somebody walking through afterlife drunk on a nice red wine.

"I already spoke to the Prince's people. They were very apologetic. Almost offensively so. Asked if we wanted to reschedule. Cheeky bureaucrats." The way the Brujah's pupils tightened communicated enough. Isaac folded both arms, his frown settling somewhere between amusement and sleep deprivation. "The young lady I spoke to was awfully concerned. I've never heard a suit so concerned. Left half her resume—can't recall who, at the moment—something Spanish. She asked me to relay the Camarilla's embarrassment to you directly. LaCroix hires some bold broads, I'll give him that."

"What did you say," the lesser Baron wanted to know.

"I took the liberty of telling her buzz off for you. Their alibi for the first, however, is concrete, and that complicates things. Speaking of." Hollywood tossed a mildly curious glance. "What did… what was the name? Something -brook. -berg. What did she have to say?"

Nines didn't bother correcting him. Isaac 'forgot' the names of most women younger than he was. "She's in Chicago. I don't know why."

"You didn't ask?"

"She hung-up on me," the Brujah snorted. Abrams shrugged a shoulder as if he might consider caring on another day.

"Bright kid. Do you think she knows?"

"Most definitely," Rodriguez insisted. He paced the marbled floor, arms crossed, looking away from lackadaisical Baron Hollywood. Stained windows looked back, diamonds of sickening orange and moss green. On the couch: gold, grandfather privilege, gray fade. They had slipped so far. "She knew I would not show up at a Camarilla thing without my soldiers. I had my best people. I would not be standing here otherwise. I had them because I suspected they would try to pull something like this; my mistake was assuming that bullet was meant for me, specifically. What I think is that LaCroix hoped he'd hit my army. Cripple the heavies from a distance, cowardly shit. And in case they didn't get me—which they were not going to do—he sent his tool to bail my ass. It covers his bases if this ever comes to court, but it won't. That's exactly what happened. You can write it down."

"I'll take your word for it," Isaac figured. Rodriguez could not let that brandy foam voice curdle his temper again.

"Now," he pressed, swallowing, harder than he meant to, letting the air start a burn in his throat. "I don't know if Woeburne was aware of where the hell she stood in this mess. My guess is probably not." That was truth. London had some guts stuck under her black tie; still, he didn't think she was cool-headed enough to maintain them under the full weight of a Camarilla plot. High clearance for a pawn, sure, "But that woman's not stupid. A superior bitch with her head halfway up her ass, maybe, but not stupid. She had to suspect it. She had to know it was going to get dropped on her."

"Well, what do you intend to do about it? We can't afford to antagonize hunters," the Toreador fat-cat observed. "I told the Prince we weren't signing any agreements until our parties regrouped. Offered us extra manpower. Hear that! Outrageous." Isaac shook his head, clucked his tongue. "It's old news. Bach's cronies were pressing their thumb into Hollywood long before the incident in Santa Monica. We've had ongoing issues. I'm not sure if you knew, but—"

"I knew," Downtown spat, hackles bristling, affronted by the presumption.

"Then you also know what a delicate position this puts me in. I can't approve a counterattack; my Childer are already in danger. They're buckling under it. They're not like your people. I hope you'll understand that."

"I _understand_ it." That Toreador face, smirking even when it wasn't—Nines could feel the rumble through stomach, muscle, throat. His rear teeth clenched. "I understand I've got men in the ground and shrapnel in my back. You're about to stand in front of those people, drop some speeches about 'sacrifices' and expect me to go along, but we all understand that. The Brujah will remember it. I will remember it," he barked. Three brigadiers gone in the span of a few deadly, dynamite months. "My soldiers choke down their blood so yours can hide in a theatre house."

"Consider the options," Isaac suggested. The relaxed way he said it made Rodriguez want to hit right on the break of that cleft. A smug, smug, curdling grin; Nines could blink and see one blow cripple those teeth in the dark of his eyelids. "I'm happy to finance your boys. You know that by now, I'm sure. We wouldn't serve you well in any other way. On that subject, my advisors tell me you are now receiving eleven percent off Velvet's monthly profit; that's without the additional donations from this office. You're spearheading this effort. I'll be the first to say so. But, with every respect, the effort depends upon my boys, too. It depends on Hollywood functioning like we always have. We can't function beneath Bach's rifle sights."

"So I have to."

"Yes, if it comes to that." Abrams tossed one bent leg over its neighbor knee. "Don't worry; I wouldn't leave you to roast out in the fire. I'll be sending a few guards to replenish your ranks. But I know well enough what you've come to ask me, and much as I'd like to endorse everything my allies put forward, I've got to say no. In the interest of preserving this thing—this kangaroo court, half-budget semblance of ceasefire—I cannot support your petition. Not about this. If the Brujah start repopulating directly after a ban, I don't know about it, and I won't defend you. I don't mean to point fingers. But your people's discretion has been questionable, their decisions have been risky, and it isn't exactly a comfort to see that jen of a Den Mother you've got running the show."

What you could call this is an alliance of convenience. It's a mutineer's hierarchy, Hollywood and Downtown; for right now, one needs the other, and both others are aware of this fact. It's a prewar pact, a partnership. But all things considered, Isaac didn't really give two cents about Nines.

Funny.

Nines _hated_ Isaac.

Nines Rodriguez hated Isaac Abrams almost as much, in fact, as he hated the Prince that made them allies. Once they smacked Los Angeles out of Ventrue hands, Baron LA fully anticipated 'Baron' Hollywood would try to snatch that open territory right back up—or, more likely, sell the Brujah out for a settlement with their Camarilla neighbors. Nines was not going to let that happen. The only solution was to bide his time, wait for LaCroix's downfall and an opportune moment, then wipe Isaac's snide grin off the coast. He would not white-flag his Domain for a haggard old honcho counting bills in a gallery. He would not.

"Keep your spies in Hollywood," Nines threatened; it wrinkled the bridge of his nose. "They'd get in my way."

Abrams sighed. He fisted a hand and used his knuckles as a pillow, elbow propped on the sofa arm. "If that's really how you want to leave it. Let's talk about buckling down on our security plans, then. I suppose I'll have to forward this to my Childer…"

But his complaints were interrupted by a crack in the mahogany door. Velvet Velour walked through it.

Isaac's decadent charity-case was quiet tonight. She slunk through the threshold of their small war room all eyes-to-herself, cloaked in a neck-to-floor black coat. It was puritanical for Velour. Her cotton-candy spiral of hair clung to shallow cheekbones in the humidity; the trench's silver clasps winked vertically down her front. She was big, Velvet—big, leggy and tall—tall as Nines was in shoes—and you couldn't tell any of that in the dark sublight of a club, or from the distance of a stage. She smelled powerfully of rosewater, baby powder, caramel, other artificial things; the combative auras of Presence in this room worsened Rodriguez's already foul mood.

"Sorry I'm late," Velvet lisped, face unreadable, gate catwalk. Baron Hollywood waved her in with an annoyed rotation of his hand.

That said, she turned her attention on their guest, blasé expression twisting into concern. _'Good little actress, Velour.'_ Her eyebrows dented; the pursed fuchsia mouth turned downwards. Good actress, but bad judge of character. Toreador should know better. Presence is not an exclusive thing.

"I heard you were shot, Nines," she said, colorless eyes flicking over him—trying to be worried, looking critical.

He did not bother being gracious. The Brujah's dislike for them was obvious in his voice, on the architecture of a wounded, adamant face. It sounded snotty, like an insult: "As a matter of fact, Velvet, I was."

She did not take the bait. Unamusedly: "Are you all right?"

He would lose this game. He would lose this one, and god, how that woman looked straight into your eyes—directly, unabashedly across a lot of space or only a little—made him hateful for reasons he could not really break down. She made you feel like a child caught breaking eggs on a kitchen floor. A millisecond glance and curt "fine" was the Anarch's only response; his ringed fingers pressed tightly around captured thumbs. He hadn't given them the details of that fight, and had not said anything of the embarrassing way he'd survived.

"Where's Ash?" Abrams asked the exit. No one else came through. You could see a Sire's feather-light hope fall to confusion, frustration, then disappointment. "I thought I told you to round him up."

VV shook her head. Snap-dragon pink nails folded neatly over the Toreador's navel. She sighed in a way that her surrogate Sire had heard a thousand times before. "I'm sorry, Isaac. He wouldn't come."

The Baron somehow did not seem surprised. But his laugh-lines deepened without any laughter. "Unbelievable. To think that boy remains too wrapped up in ancient grudges for a half-hour meeting on safety protocol?"

"You know how he is," Velvet answered helplessly, shrugging, luxuriantly alto, a voice you couldn't help hear and not feel calmed down by. She returned to Nines. "But you oughtn't to be standing. Please, sit." She strode across her patron's office to direct Rodriguez to a chair, but there was little warmth about her invitation, and when she tapped his forearm, no heat in the tips of fingers acting hard to be more alive. "You must be in pain."

Nines yanked away, met false empathy with a bark. "Don't try that shit on me, Velvet. You are not my friends."

She blinked at him, put-out by the failed attempt, and took a seat beside Abrams. VV thought she was everybody's Lady Love. Whether or not that was true depended—but what does not change, and does not "depend," is that a big animal growls when he is in the most pain.

Isaac observed their brief scrape. His only comment was a stale, uninterested breath out. "See what I've been dealing with all evening?" The Brujah knew he was being belittled. He swallowed his hurting and his hiss.

"I do not have time. I do not have time for this," Rodriguez rumbled. It felt like ants biting the wounds in his back. "If you're looking to make good on that promise of doing something worthwhile for me, contact your sewer-rats, put down a line, and keep me informed. Get somebody on footwork in Santa Monica. Figure out what Woeburne's doing in Chicago. I want to know about it. Otherwise, you can keep your people collared in Hollywood. You can keep them tied to the fucking pole."

Velour was one of those remarkable people who could not be offended. She hid her thoughts and her preferences behind a glitter of conflict-resolution; the tinted face was a slate of dispassion, unreadable, and utterly closed.

"I wish you'd calm down, Nines."

"I wish you'd shut up, Velvet," the Anarch cut back, burr hardened into shotgun flak. She looked at him with wordless displeasure. Isaac said nothing. He watched his recruiter caught back-and-forth in the end of the rat's maze. "As for the Society: if they become an issue, I'll take care of them. As usual. Because I am apparently the only one in this whole fucking outfit who can."

Abrams turned a cheek on this one. He had the age to forgive Rabble when they inevitably blew a fuse. He had the experience not to care about toothless fury. So he listened—absently, unruffled, propped on one edge of his office couch, fingertips drumming the polished pine.

Anarchs only buck like this when they see the chains on their feet; and though he still spoke like a MacNeil free man, Nines Rodriguez saw his a long time ago. If letting him yell and deal orders made the man more manageable, then by all means, Baron Hollywood wasn't getting tangled up over it. They all had seen who their betters were.

The Toreador was calm when his collaborator about-faced and made to storm out onto an empty street.

"One last thing, Nines, before you go."

Abrams did not rise, and Nines did not turn. He directed the polite aside to a back that was bleeding through its scabs, bandage, and armor.

"I've never been a sticker for protocol among my friends," Isaac mentioned. "But, since you pointed it out: let me remind you where you're standing. This _is_ my Barony. So please, speak your mind. I encourage it. But as long as it remains my Barony, I expect you will address me with the respect a Baron deserves."

Rodriguez's look was odious blue moonstone. "Address me with soldiers or get out of my way."

Watching the door bang, Isaac had a nagging suspicion that boy was going to try and kill him someday.

But not tonight.


	56. The Jungle

"You must be Beckett," she'd said, palm out, and the Foreman was terribly relieved when he shook it.

Ms. Woeburne here admits she doesn't really give a damn why or how she is what she is.

Frankly, there's no time. A rational ancilla, like her, juggles concerns a good bit more pertinent to survival than digging up its origins. And there you have it. Whatever curiosity the Ventrue once had was smothered long ago—stomped, neatly, beneath decades of Primogen, of handshakes, of black censor lines and of marble polish on thunderstorm nights. It isn't because she doesn't care. At least, not less than anyone else, Ms. Woeburne supposes. It's just that, when one forks their way through five dozens deadlines for a demon in a charcoal Kiton, the deep-seated question of "where did I come from?" rings a little superfluous, and more than a little bit sad.

So, being as low-brow as she was about the Darwinian theories of vampirism, perhaps it was simple prejudice making S.W. imagine what Beckett might be like. She figured him for some intolerant, granny-faced stick-in-the-mud, clacking a cane on the cobbles, still wearing his graduation hood. Are you surprised that a card-carrying member of the family nicknamed _Patricians_ tends to stereotype? She only hoped he would not turn out to be another greasy, dust-laden, perverted clod categorizing his Encyclopedia Britannicas by monocle-lens and flickering candlelight.

Fortunately, there was no monocle. There was, though, a hat, the shadows of which disassembled the Victorian face into shapes and lines; leather brim, blunt chin, listless black hair, hollow cheeks. He wasn't an intimidating figure. Upright and gamey, complexion weak, posture a bit sloppy. He had a ballpoint pen tucked into the band of his akubra like a joke, a battered brown coat over gaunt shoulders, and a loitering, dissociated scrutiny—very attentive, just a little sadistic. Shallow reading lines cut open triangles around his temples. A thin mouth, two pupils slit through tangerine. Manticore eyes, slim and half-full, peering over sunglasses.

"You must be Beckett" had been the appropriate thing to say.

"I must be," he granted her, sounding somewhat disenchanted with the fact. His accent was odd, lisping and petulant. He flicked one finger at his old hat. "And that must make you LaCroix's chief gopher."

When the historian shook her hand, Ms. Woeburne crunched—felt offended somehow—and realized she might be facing a small, uncomfortable tangent. She thought Beckett was a little attractive.

"Yes, that's me," she admitted, furrowed dot in the center of her brow, not a smile to be had. Perhaps there had been a primary school crush on a neighborhood librarian or perhaps the Foreman had a penchant for elitists who were apt to treat her poorly, but the sudden recognition of _being_ attracted jarred her. Ms. Woeburne was not aware she could still be attracted. Not by something so boring. Not by something with no reason behind it, that is; not by something un-supernatural. He was not really altogether pretty or masculine. Oh contraire, the expert looked a little epicene—he had a skulk, not a walk, and his chin was a tad weak. Call it a matter of taste, she supposed, one that sat beneath a hundred other things to do, nothing worth justifying. And, to tell true, she'd rather not. It was a pointless by-the-way. It was the making straight-laced officer cranky, actually. "I hope I'm not too early. This is my first time in Chicago. And I'd have never forgiven myself if I'd kept you waiting."

"Actually, I think I'm late," he drawled. There was no sign of a watch on either wrist, and it was doubtful Beckett would've checked it, anyway.

She blinked through what became a frown.

Ms. Woeburne might have winced out a smile, if it had not been for the _gopher_.

S.W. had prepared a short and heel-kissing introduction script during the plane trip. One's ability to lick clientele's shoes with a grateful smile was essential for Camarilla advancement. Still, the chipper cast of her negotiation face tasted more and more like lemon rinds lately. She cleared her throat with an authoritarian _hmn_! "It's all right. On behalf of Prince LaCroix, and myself: thank you for meeting with us. We are honored you took the time. Los Angeles won't forget your courtesy, or your candor."

The distinguished old Gangrel seemed a bit tired with it all. He readjusted his cap and swept out an arm, shooing Ms. Woeburne along the metal pedestrian bridge. Her clip was rough and aggressive. The green park ahead of them tangled with black iron fencing and bodies on bicycles. The lake at her back was oceanic, and, even in summer, looked like it would be murderously cold.

"Don't flatter yourselves too much. You teased me. But your proposition was still the most interesting one I had this evening, so I suppose you teased competently." There was a cavalier lethargy to his offhand manner of speech that smacked of Elder status. She looked like a cookie-cutter black suit image against the darkening blue.

"Well," S.W. said briskly, far along down the tin path now, back toward the way she just came. Being directed about by a Gangrel annoyed her. Her shoes clicked plating, pavement, and pushed forward for a circle of nighttime dogwoods, a mild funereal pink. "Either way, I apologize for distracting you from your investigation. The Seneschal tells me you're looking into Chicago's Lupine problem."

Beckett's thick eyebrows lifted, amused. "That's what they'd love to believe. But as far as I am concerned, Decker can have his happy, morbid way with the Midwest Lupines. I'm here rendezvousing with some dear old friends of mine." The man adjusted his glasses. He had a slow stride with a minor wolfish under-lurch, trench hitting his calves, hands clasped loosely behind a long back. Woeburne walked much faster than him and had to rein in her pace. It was frustrating. Something that must've been a bird shook through the hawthorns overhead. "In the interest of time, let's jump right to the point, shall we. I'm sure a burgeoning diplomat like yourself has other things to do," he remarked. And wasn't that the truth. "Do you have the curiosity in question, young one?"

S.W. derailed. Her head cocked, spaniel-like. It made tiny earrings, one pearl in each lobe, blink. "Not on my person, of course. I'm sorry—did a Ms. Lefevre forward the briefing to you earlier this week?"

"I'm afraid not," Beckett said, lazily. "If I'd had more information upfront, I might've saved you a trip. But your offices seemed to think I'd snatch the work and disappear. Pity. Nevertheless, what little they released to me has piqued my ear, so all is not lost." The Gangrel sent a single, curious nod towards her portfolio bag; it banged steadily against Ms. Woeburne's left hip. She stopped sharp and fumbled for the spit-shined buckles. "Don't rush on my behalf. I don't dull quite as easily as some of my more unflattering followers suggest."

"It's no trouble. I've brought copies," she informed him. Beckett made a patronizing, eureka _"ah!"_ and a following _"of course you did."_ 'Precious little lackeys,' it sounded like, but S.W. doesn't allow criticism to bother her unless it comes from inside the Camarilla. The Foreman rooted through her labeled file holders, fingers racing over printer paper. It was an action with some irritation attached, but she was sure the documents were inside; Ms. Woeburne quadruple-checked. She'd even tagged them with citrusy orange stickers. It was a sickeningly Ventrue thing to do. "If you'll give me just a moment."

"Oh, please, take your time."

The pamphlets emerged as neat and clipped as they had been in Los Angeles, when she'd last counted them, standing in the boarding line. 'Classified' glared boldly beneath the intimidating blue LACROIX FOUNDATION stamp. S.W. extended them with a fake, crinkly, upbeat smile, and Beckett looked about as skeptical as a parent with a late report card.

"Excellent," he observed, opened, and indulged.

Ms. Woeburne stood awkwardly by while the archeologist read. She'd exchanged a hefty check for this packet some time ago in Café Cavoletti; it seemed lackluster, mundane, too thin for its bill. Mira waltzed away with her new title, and Bruno was ousted, and a committee seat was secure. Here was an alliance paved with the morbid Giovanni, and over _what_? Some finely-chiseled limestone that had likely been pillaged by tomb-raiders centuries ago. Admirable craftsmanship, to be sure, but still fundamentally a dead-box. This sounded an awful lot like eccentricity on Mr. LaCroix's behalf; perhaps his age, teetering on the lip of Elder, was beginning to worm its way in.

Maybe five minutes later—when she felt extraneous enough to try "excuse me"—the Gangrel cut in with a cough. His hat threw a shadow across the satellite photographs, the manilla, and the hands that held them. They were incongruently heavy for a very careful man. "These look to be Assyrian hieroglyphs. Interesting. Very interesting, actually. You brought more than pictures, I hope." S.W. handed over the CD case already in her grip. "Excellent" again. "Consider me involved. Tentatively. I'm looking forward to having a gander at these."

Ms. Woeburne—who doubted the legitimacy of that dusty picture almost as much as she doubted herself—stared at him, taking a moment to be sure Beckett wasn't being facetious. He didn't seem like it. Perhaps appearances were deceiving in regards to crumbling caskets, ceasefires, and explorers whose knuckles were less delicate than their faces looked.

"I'm glad to hear that, Mr. Beckett," the Ventrue confessed. Mr. Beckett didn't love the 'Mr.' She saw his eyebrow jump too late, and smoothed a palm heel over her head, flattening some stray brunette. It was a pitiable nervous habit—something for her wrists to do, winches tightening, their prelude to movement. Woeburne's fingers balled into a fist when she caught herself at it. "And I'm sure Mr. LaCroix will say the same. The excavation is underway; we estimate it will export to the US within a few months. Before the new year, barring any major upsets. We'd love to have your opinion at that time. The Prince offers complimentary lodgings, will reimburse you for the travel fare, and will fully fund your research, of course. There's no one else we'd rather have study it."

It, indeed. And this was the cardboard-padded secret Sebastian once deemed too "sensitive" for Ms. Woeburne's eyes?

Prince Los Angeles had a little tangent of his own.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," Beckett advised her, slipping his CDs tidily into a coat pocket and tucking the reports under an arm. Orange sclerae were visible for a moment before disappearing behind the black bulwark of his glasses. Ms. Woeburne hoped this was an isolated case of sex appeal and that she wasn't one of those creepy Gangrel fetishists. He was still speaking, despite the wooden expression on his company's face. "Why don't I scurry home and look over what you've given me, and if I find this business is still up to both of our standards… you know. I'll be in touch. Don't go far, young one."

"I won't," the Foreman promised. She was standing like a minuteman-at-arms. "I'm staying at the Drake and am booked in Chicago for some time. My contact information is on a post-it in the files I passed you. And my name is Woeburne. It's Ms. Woeburne." Her introduction was a little late, but it's not as though he'd specifically asked.

"That will do," was the reply she got. You could tell from Beckett's indifferent expression that her name had flown in one ear and merrily out the other. Weary of the good corporate manners, he'd already started rifling, pulling out inventory sheets and time slots. "This is the only full report I'm going to find in here, I imagine," the Gangrel asked. She nodded without knowing whether or not it was. "I was afraid of that. One can never mistake the handiwork of Clan Giovanni. Of course, it's a caricature of an expedition. For all that preoccupation with death, they've never really got it. Just goes to show that boredom and money will never be an adequate replacement for actually knowing what one is doing. If you ask my opinion. Which you did."

"Yes, and we're willing to do whatever we can to—"

A sigh. He flickered another moment over the three top pages. He didn't want to hear it anymore from her. "Sad. I wonder if they have any idea what it is they're digging up." A second, slightly louder sigh. "Give me an evening or two to make sense of these no doubt embarrassing notes. When I come up with something conclusive—if I do—I'll give you a ring. Until then, I believe this falls into the 'don't call us; we'll call you' category."

"Understood," S.W. replied, mostly unoffended. She was used to the ego and the arrogance. When one caters to Sebastian LaCroix on a monthly basis, that one grows awfully thick skin. "In the event my employers pass on more information, I'll forward it to you ASAP. You're welcome to check in with me at any time for updates. Also, if you have further questions, I'll be available." ( _That_ was dangerously true. Ms. Woeburne had no idea what she ought to be doing in Chicago apart from jumping the circus hoops required to maintain Beckett's interest, that is. She sort of got the impression Prince LA would've endorsed his Childe taking up naked, blindfolded, one-armed knife-juggling if that prevented the wandering old historian from sighing, tiring, and looking the other way. It was disturbing to think it might already be out of her hands.)

But she'd bet it wasn't. S.W. suspected they'd already battened down Beckett's attention. He acted awfully nonplussed, but she wasn't fooled. Aloofness feels unpleasant, but in this case, it was likely meant to toy with a stereotype he didn't care for, to thwart the Ventrue tendency to résumé-build. An irritating proposal. But it was also a typical one, a fairly harmless one, and kind of worth a chuckle. As if One-Track Woeburne needed any outside help jeopardizing her position.

Stress aside, humor aside—the fact this was at least half a political exile aside—she shook the scholar's hand again and about-faced for a taxi cab, neither glancing after, neither bothering to wave goodbye.

And that put her business on pause.

Ms. Woeburne turned into the shadow of a new downtown. Skyscrapers crowded around her with stern, uncompromising edges. Across the frantic avenue, a wash of light, restaurant patios and storefronts, the quarter-cuts of women's forms en pointe inside. Pedestrians in officewear nudged beneath the arms of party-goers; tourists lost baseball caps; some kine drank while Kindred hunted stupid ones. Bodies, ignored, crouched beneath the hanging signs; iron awnings; a strange wire tangle over the streets. It was hot. Locust trees wore red mulch in late summer, simmering to brown. Elevated tracks rattled overhead, wrenching through a hundred sharp buildings. Ten thousand tiny windows blinked. Voices shouted: Korean, Polish, languages and dialects, and the footprint of steelworks still stank beneath this sidewalk, in the old city soil. Park grass glistened behind her. Someone played a saxophone. You could smell the great lake from here, chemical and phosphoric. She glanced down the block with nowhere in particular to go.

It is an abnormal state of being—Ms. Woeburne with nowhere she has to go.

The Ventrue was restless. She couldn't be still. And perhaps all the itching wasn't a bad thing; perhaps she needed some sort of distraction, some sort of polestar down the track, to keep her fast-wheeling mind from wandering back to Santa Monica Pier. These were the details she didn't want, the flame for bad dreams, the texture of concrete making her elbows sear. Bullet ricochet and peppery smells. Gasoline, burning metal, the near-black of oil spilling into blood— _no more,_ _she told herself,_ _no more of that_. They added up to failure. They ended in her ability to fall short, to fall _through_.

She snapped the anger and the _unknowns_ short before her poor stomach could hurt.

' _At least the meeting went well,'_ Ms. Woeburne reminded herself, an attempt to be optimistic. One step at a time. _'Beckett was civil enough.'_

There wasn't much use worrying about whether or not he would ever call—not yet, anyway. A cab screeched by and she thrust up her arm. It was reflex, automatic. This city shoved and choked in a way Los Angeles, sweating with smog, does differently. She had to keep moving her feet.

Ms. Woeburne climbed over the imitation leather with little fuss and said _hold, please_ so she might study a backseat map. It was hard to pick out her destination. This battery burst of movement, of need, seemed like a productive change, or something like progress. Perhaps, S.W. dared—perhaps, dolefully busy and staunchly unsmiling—she might actually have time to appreciate this. Maybe she would see her surroundings instead of divvying them into parts. Maybe she could rest her anxieties and learn what they meant. Maybe she would sort out what had happened and what there was to be done about it. Maybe, with an annoyed Prince and a lot of bad luck, she'd even get a little sight-seeing done.

' _Ankaran Sarcophogus. What a crock,'_ the Ventrue scoffed, slammed the car door, and settled into exile as best a little corporal can. 


	57. Room of Parts

Colton's ear had grown back, but his pride still stung where the skin was soft and new.

The Gangrel's shoulders pressed one foundering wall of Hallowbrook Hotel as they all listened to Marcus scream. It was hard for him pay attention. That was the exception, not the rule, because there'd been a time not long ago when this not-alpha man was the one who heard, smelled, scented everything. He found the danger before it happened. He could be counted upon to notice, predict, see. But it wasn't easy _seeing_ the Ductus through the musk of this old room—not when the cobwebs were thick and clustered as mucus, not when your arms were burbling with energy, and not when embarrassment burned the blood a terrible purple-black beneath your face.

The Grand Lobby had been a sight once, probably. These chandeliers, now eaten green, had been shining bronze; you could see the stems where it had once flowered glass bulbs; you could still see bits of the broken glass clinging on, like flesh to a chicken wing bone. There were still footprints of a time when this place was for live families. There were relics: darkwood paneling, mahogany, he figured, aching for whale wax; spiral flights with wide, softly groaning steps and charred cream carpet; champagne wallpaper latticed with delicate, pretentious leaves. That must've been forty years ago. All those tiny leaves were now peeling brown—horse glue, cigar smoke, termite cracks in the foundations. His ear canals itched from the dusty air. A Ductus with a big mouth and an endlessness behind his big, Brujah, cannibal teeth.

King's temper was a slow-boiling pot. Marcus kept hollering; Colton, out-of-sight on a staff stair, drew mazes through the fig leaf print with some soot on one fingernail, trying to swallow whatever was making his tongue so sour. Johnny was probably going to get dragged over the hot coals this weekend. He meant it literally. They had done that once. They did it to Sal—he'd seen it. They'd tied his wrists together and pulled up like an Olympian on a diving board, like a Christian on a rack; they'd shook out some lighter fluid; and they dragged him. Colton had poured lamp oil on his stomach and thighs. He could not tell you why he did that. It was asked of him, so he did it, and if you lie on your belly with your nose to the ground, you can still taste body ash in the basement shower room where it happened. That felt like a long time ago now. Sal lived, somehow. Nobody died. Nobody died, so they'd just come through with a wicker sweep and a garden hose, then chucked out the charcoal bits. They'd swept it almost clean.

There'd been another incident in Compton yesterday. Five shots traded and two dead footmen; who knew if it'd been anybody's fault, but they all knew that didn't matter. Not one fig leaf worth.

More than the shutting-up, the listening, the obeying, _this_ was the hardest part for a man like King. He watched himself committing injustice and had no real answer why. Shame and irritation licked from that kettle he stewed. He was full of rank, unwashable grease. Sometimes, these nights, Colt remembered how his Pa teased him, how he'd cheered up his boy with the bad-color hair: _Your mop's just going to glow harder the madder you get._ Red in his roots, in his nose when Ma would sock him, in the wetness of the sheets upstairs where they strapped human cattle to bedposts with belts and thumbed out their eyes. He used to be on Kine detail. He was a processor. He took the captives and made them into something less than people. Wrenched out their teeth, cut off their fingers, put all the disconnected stubs in a shoebox and the molars in a pail. His only answer for this is that the little Irish-red boy had become a little too smart to pick fights he couldn't win. After surviving three years of Torres's grand-martial law, you lean to check your injustice and choose your battles. You learn to turn down your flame. You stuck a lid on that pot that you didn't peek under, and you never picked it up.

The musty heat of their hostel bore down. Everybody had been kicked a few times in this pack; people got forgot, nobody ever got forgiven. You'd think it'd feel normal after a while. Maybe that _while_ just hadn't come to pass yet, but nothing about this became normal, not for Colton King. Watching the Ductus bark about failure—watching him whip Johnny, that stupid, loudmouth kid, in the face with a crowbar for choking out something that wasn't "yes." Marcus was full of his own shit. Their leader's eyes were gold-on-black, pupils ringed by hate; it was a glare that swarmed, like frenzied hornets. You couldn't let it catch you unawares. There was nowhere in here to shake off a hive.

Johnny was so stupid; he was such a braindead little shit; you wished he would take it easy on you, on all of us, and figure out how to shut the fuck up.

If he'd been a bit older, Colton swore, when their current Ductus pushed monomacy rites on their last one, he'd've done something about it. He's not too sure what. King wasn't particularly fond of their dead loser chief—never knew him, personally, beyond the heartbeat pang of the Vinculum. He wouldn't have died for him. He wouldn't have died for anyone. But he wouldn't have stood there, at least. He wouldn't have gone to stone in this very same room as Marcus took a fire axe and chopped his predecessor in two, three, four, five, too many pieces to see.

Colt watched a lot—watched horrible things, gory things, things made of brain and intestine and steel. He diffused, and evaporated, and watched himself do them. But given another chance, he wouldn't have watched a Brujah diablerize a body with its head hanging off by a bright blue cord.

Torres's coup was sloppy and blunt. Even now, the thought of it stirred a raw meat taste in his belly, made him flinch like a humiliating memory. Vicious motherfucker did not deserve the title. Marcus didn't deserve anything, but there wasn't much to be done about that from this slumping stairwell, where King sheltered his bad feelings and where he couldn't see Johnny's nose smashed in, pulled off. _'Not mine, not tonight'_ had become the Gangrel's mantra. He reached up to paw at his ear. You could just spot, through that shorn-close hair, the veins throbbing on Marcus's skull. _'Not any time soon.'_

Sabbat Jyhad is simple at street level. Marcus had won because he was a Brujah; he had a good twenty years on most of their withering den; and the neonates swooned around him, high off pheromones and sometimes methamphetamine. Colton wished Johnny would shut up, but he also wished Marcus would die, so he wouldn't have to watch himself doing chop work anymore.

"Colt," Inés murmured at his left, a sickly, yellowing grin Kershawed through her face. It was an ugly wolf kind of a smile, and it made her bangs, short nutmeg, tickle over briny eyes. She elbowed him in the belly beneath his ribcage. She always looked like she was squinting through a shutter of sea grass. "Hey. Is it just me, or does Torres look a little _sore?"_

Inés Herrera was King's blood-bound packmate and the closest he had to a friend in this place. She was also kind of a shitty Lasombra, to be honest. The woman had been Embraced a couple years before he had, some dead Sire's accident, and spent that time wandering rural California. Caitiff only have one or two options if they want to civilize. The best pick was obvious—it was Sal who'd recruited her one sweltering night when she'd drifted into Los Angeles during a drought. Absence of water, everything shriveling green. Messy coincidence: she'd smacked Colton with the fender of her car, jumped out to fight, and been initiated by force, on-spot. They threw her down a sewer stair, broke open her head without losing the brain. He had held it in with the palm of his hand. Colt figured that was the moment he knew a person, with Inés—the place where _she_ was, where she lived, though he hadn't heard her name yet—against his fingers, inside the bowl of them, a place also used to cup water, to scoop sand, to guard fire and hope that it grows. He knew already he was going to love her so much and he did.

You will learn, with the Sabbat, that pain is a transient thing. And god, as much King loathed Marcus, something in him swore to do any horror at all, if doing horrors would prevent the other bodies connected to him from crumbling up. It shouldn't have been any sort of surprise, then. It should not have shaken him, first, how Colton was blown-away by the immediacy and intensity of affection between himself and his sister. Those eyes, the color of rotting hazel, were as familiar to him as any cousin had been in life. Eyes are the windows to the brain. That's the real place you are. The rest is just illusion; it is just a house of bone.

Want to know something? King had been a despicable racist of the _Good Ol' Boy_ variety in life. Now nonsensical hate had been shoved out of contention by tousled hair, soft-shell jackets, lanky joints, dark eyes and darker hair.

The Gangrel squinted and scraped at his stubble, a rusty itch, as their Ductus smashed Potence into some other kid's cheekbone. "What're you getting at, Neskie?"

"Look at him," she urged. _Psst, psst_ ; that's all it was from Inés most nights, taps on the toe and a finger gouging, something from fifth grade. She'd click the heels of their boots together to get his attention. Her whisper, a brookish contralto with a smile attached, winnowed through that little extra space between her two front teeth. It never straightened out or sobered up. Colton thought sometimes he was in love with Inés, but after the Vaulderie, when the cut was still fresh and the smell of their meats crawled through these cruise ship white rugs, he would feel that way about everybody for a while. "Watch his left knee. Look at him limp. Marcus was always shit at dealing with pain. I bet the Bishop fucked him. I bet he flopped on the floor with his pants at his ankles and cried." There was a note of pleasure to the thought. She did not bother dressing it as something else.

"So what," Colton brushed. He said it too fast, too irritably, and was ashamed by the twang of deep South hanging around in there. Colton was still ashamed about everything. His hair, his earlobe, the neonate days when he'd break in the cattle, and the noise of a crowbar removing their dull teeth. It served Torres right, getting hammered by a Bishop, but it didn't make King hurt less. "You should've come seen me, few weeks back. I thought my face was going to come off."

"I heard. But you know that shit falls down a long chain before it ever hits us lowlifes, Colt. Big boss was stark-raving after the warehouse went up, and I don't think he ever got over it. Rub that into the general shit-job Marcus has been making of security lately. We didn't even _know_ about the Pier. You realize what that says to HQ about the local management? He's lucky not to be stuck on somebody's feather-duster at this point. You got your shots, I know, but nobody hurts like Bishop. Not even him."

"And what?" King wanted to know. His snort was gruff and unparticular. "That's the price he pays for getting where he is. Nobody forced that on him. Nobody pushed him into being what he is, who he—"

" _Sst_. Keep your finger on the volume," Inés reminded him, elbowing his lower back. Colton grunted more from the scolding than from the ache. "I understand you're pissed about it, but you get _me_ in hot water with Marcus, and I swear. I'll rip off your other ear."

"That so?" The Gangrel was just about to ask " _you and what army?"_ when they were stopped.

Their Ductus had a glare like the head of a spear. Torres whirled on them both with large shoulders and damp temples, the bleached crew-cut glistening along his scalp. He was part wrestler, part bear.

"If you shovelheads on the stairs don't shut the fuck up, I will come over there, and I'll tear out every tongue in this house," he screamed. It was an empty threat, but King and Herrera shrunk. Marcus was marginally appeased by the submission. His voice wasn't deep—it was a mean middle-pitch—but the Brujah compensated, his charisma a medicine of violence. To keep the pack mindful, to assert his authority, he would occasionally yank the spine out of whoever failed him. He'd stage dripping, putrid public exhibitions. He'd grab a head in his mitt and pull it straight up. Then he'd arc back and throw. You can imagine the disaster that made. They'd scrub walls for weeks and the rancid cow stench never came out.

Women's teeth in milk buckets, poured down a drain.

"I've had it up to _here_ with you all. Constant fucking whining," Torres frothed, the orange peel planes of his back angular and aggressive beneath a thin white shirt. There was so much blood in here, new and old, dead bits that clung on. You never knew how that cotton stayed so clean. "There is no excuse. Santa Monica is our claim. And now I've got to deal with flak from Chicago because you maggots aren't capable of doing your jobs at border control? Shit is going to start running around here. We aren't losing more territory to some half-dead Anarchs or the motherfucking Ventrue; not Compton; not the coast. I want _real_ patrols—do you understand?—real honest-to-God patrols, all hours." Saliva splattered and it looked rabid, too much like cream. It is the kind that scrapes the throat, the byproduct of raggedness. "Since this is all obviously so fucking amusing, you can take first shift tonight, King. Inés, round up the third and ship your ass to that pier. I want you there 'til sunup. If you cut short—either one of you pieces-of-shit—heads are going to fly. I don't care whose. I don't care. Are we clear?"

Colton and Inés didn't speak anymore about Marcus's limp or his knee. Their statures went omega. Their consent came in wordless nods.

Torres was not impressed. He hovered there, bristling, for another few seconds. "And so? Don't just stand there gawping at me, couple of fucking retards, fell off the school bus. Get the fuck out."

Liquor in the depths of those eyes—and Colton thinks that's them, that's the live parts, of all the ones he'd spooned out.

_'Not me. Not mine. Not tonight,'_ the Gangrel told himself. The stairs creaked beneath him as they stood. Colton couldn't find the courage to steal a goodbye at Inés.

"Son-of-a-bitch," he heard the Lasombra mumble before she turned and pattered upstairs for her tactical gear.


	58. Five Finger Fillet

Half-past twelve downtown in LA, and a Den Mother was trying to look bored.

There's an odd quiet in The Last Round when nobody else is. It's not loneliness. It's the absence of anger, of people who feel the need to grit their teeth. When you're alone in here, the eyes on these walls feel more dead than alive, and there is no one to pull you from them. There's no one around to yell _shut up_ at, to feel annoyed by, to hold up a beer bottle and let it drop into a pancake of brown glass, to say stupid shit, to need a key to a lockbox, to ask a Den Mother for food. It is just you in the green wood like a belly of a galleon. You feel looked down at from skyscrapers. You feel the weight of new nights on this place—like water pressure—like a White Whale—like a Russian submarine.

Damsel sat cross-legged on the table of a booth, chin in her fist, thumbing through text messages that she'd read a time or two before. She told Nines not to waste his time on Hollywood tonight. If it walks like a Cam, she told him— _if it walks like a Cam, talks like a Cam, thinks like a Cam, stinks like a Cam_ —you can probably guess what it is.

But Nines wasn't here. He was out there, neck-deep in Isaac's spectacular rotating repertoire of bullshit. Damsel advised him (because this, as a Den Mother, is her job, isn't it?) not to bother consulting Abrams. They have needs Downtown, and if Baron Hollywood has a problem with their fulfillment of those needs, he can go pattycake with the Eurotrash fascist down the street. It made her blood pound. It made her feel weak. Like she was sitting on cold corpses—Preacher, Doughie, Skelter, who knows how many more—waiting for the dead names to roll in, leaving her sick in this horrible, knot-of-guts way. She never particularly cared for them, and Skelter never liked her, but they were Nines's men. And so they were Damsel's men, too.

But Nines didn't like the idea, and he didn't appreciate her suggestion. Gave her an unkind word in public, an unkinder word in private; he had that cool, side-eye, punishing look. When he got like that, wore that face, the man who had become her Sire would snap, glare, tell everyone to settle down. Shut up, he'd say. He'd throw around words that stood to hurt you, make some furious kids ashamed of themselves. He'd tell them over and over they had to _be smart_. This was when he did not simply push Damsel off her soap-box. The Den Mother tried her best not to get overly pissed off when this happened. Nines was their PR guy. It's his responsibility to say _lid it, pipe down, wait for your time._ It's her responsibility to scrape up the pieces, scatter the ash, and always—without fault; without tripping; without wondering, dizzy, _how did we get here so fast_ —be loyal.

Damsel was good at scraping up pieces. She's good at scattering ash. And she is good—even after all these years, all these dead kids, all these stomach aches, all these big ideas held down—at being loyal. She has her diatribes. She does not disagree.

It'd be nice if he didn't have to be so fucking sour with her, crises on their plate every night, a Den Mother's mad scramble to kick dirt over the flame of what their Baron did (or didn't do). That's Nines for you. Great talker. Talk his way into a Ventrue's sock drawer; talk a Toreador out of the closet; talk a Malk into dropping the gat and putting her hands on her head. But he listened to nobody, and let nobody not-listen to him.

A vinegar taste in her mouth. Damsel tried sighing it away. She flopped her hat on the table, then the phone inside it, and finally flatted her whole self beside them; she tried to be calm. When that failed, there was only looking calm, and _looking_ is the closest either she or Nines gets to calm these days. Her hair was coarse and crimson draped over the edge of the booth table. Her eyes were a nervous carnivore green in the bar mirror; they narrowed on a chipped corner of glass. Difficult to sweat the small shit. And it's difficult to keep from staring at the empty chair where Skelter sat, glaring at her, holding his shotgun and somehow holding everything in.

Playboy had placed himself there now: slumping in that seat, Weatherby leant against the wallpaper, right where moss paper peeled to brown plank. She was not completely alone tonight, after all. K-Al made an awkward replacement; they'd have to adjust. After Santa Monica Pier, Nines had ordered an all-hours door guard on the place; there'd been no time to footsie around _too soon_. The Den Mother doubted Leopold would fire on their establishment, but having missed the boardwalk, she wished they'd try.

All right. That's not true. But that's what she'd told Nines. It sat a hell of a lot better than _"I'm a shaking little bitch who needs a man's approval_ _,_ _"_ _anyway._ Being a bully is always better than that alternative; it's better than not knowing what to do or what to say. It's better to be pigheaded, build a shield, bounce everything off it, than cough and snot everywhere and cry she was scared. _Scared_ doesn't do jack shit. She was real scared when Jacquelyn blew up. She was real scared when their Baron lugged in with a bunch of holes through him the second time in a few months. She gets real scared with all these memorials staring down at her, their sort-of smiles and their grainy photographs, a bunch of familiar kids mixed between a couple ones the Den Mother never met, but felt she knew. It was too easy to imagine her own face up there. It was too frightening to wonder what would be written into the wall.

Scarier than that—something she thought about all the time, but couldn't say—was who didn't make it on the wall. Nines would never go up there. That wasn't a promise; it was just a certainty, one everybody knew: when the Baron goes, so have we. Maybe not right away. Maybe they'd hold out another year if San Fran bussed in, pick some other figurehead out, make it work for a while—but it wouldn't take long. She got a sense these people understand that. But nobody knows it better than a Den Mother who doesn't really belong here, doesn't get called _child_ , didn't earn where she was.

Skelter had always accused her of that—of not "deserving" what she had, of being overprivileged, of riding in the tail-wakes. Mean, dour, honest son-of-a-bitch, seemed like he'd always be here. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction of her cowering. She was not going to be another Big Goddamn Inconvenience in the life of Nines Rodriguez.

Damsel tried to never look at Houlihan's photo. There was too much to lose in that Valleygirl blonde, that would've-been Baron who seemed mad when she smiled, these angry love notes scribbled into the wood. Most of the people who wrote those things were dead now. Not many of them got pictures, either.

Damsel didn't mind being killed much. She was scared, more than anything else, of being let-die.

She didn't think they had a good picture of Skelter. Someone would have to slap some galoshes on, sneak back to the pier, fish out his shotgun. There was nothing else to put up.

Nines never looked at that wall. Damsel used to think that was ugly of him—that it was one of the dark little details she, as a charity Childe, shouldn't study too close. But she was beginning to understand now. She was beginning to see—with the clock on the door and the empty chairs; with the gunpowder closet and the clueless recruits, the skinny freckled ones, never meant to make it; with his bloodstains on her shirt she'd thrown out because it wasn't worth saving, and it couldn't be cleaned. Sometimes a Den Mother feels eyes on her. But it always seemed like those dead-kid faces were staring at him.

There was an uncomfortable, salty pang in her gut, so Damsel picked up a coaster and hucked it at Kent-Alan's sand dollar mop of hair.

The Toreador reacted spectacularly to everything. Upside-down, she watched the cardboard saucer plink off a pointy nose; he snorted awake, gangly limbs groping for his firearm. All that blissful farm-boy yellow on a tall forehead _._ Damsel gave a single, loud laugh, taking it at his expense. Playboy was still fumbling when he saw her engine-red sneakers weren't moving for cover. They were kicked up and crossed lazily against the wall, heels propped just beneath where their memorials began.

"Wake up, trash," Damsel barked, rubber toes tapping the cheap plywood. The woman's capris, fake-army fatigue, bunched around her pale knees. "You're supposed to be watching the door. The _door_. I look away for five minutes, and the only thing you're watching is the insides of your eyelids. Nines comes back from Hollywood and finds you drooling yourself, he'll be pissed."

"I wasn't sleeping and I definitely wasn't _drooling_ ," he informed her, wiping the spit spot off his rust-colored corduroy. K-Al stood up and dusted off needlessly, propping the rifle against the wall. "I was deep in thought. Nice, meaty, controversial thoughts about… about the pyramid scheme, in fact. Nines would commend my philosopher's spirit and quite possibly promote me."

"Could you possibly be more full of shit?"

Kent-Alan dragged his collapsible chair to their Den Mother's booth. It made one long, loud metal stroke. Damsel's was bristling when he arrived; Playboy flicked the seat into a locked position, then straddled it, folding both lanky arms into a pillow for that smart, narrow chin. His knees poked out at awkward ninety-degrees. "You're right. You're so right. I'm lazy, good-for-nothing. Actual garbage. Terrible influence," the Toreador heaved. He buried his face into a nest of elbows. "I am unworthy of your guidance! Please show me the way of the warrior, my wise Brujah battle-maid. I can see that you—unlike contemptible, slothful me—are very busy on your side of the room, valiantly holding the table down."

If the position of Damsel's feet and head were reversed, she'dve kicked his teeth. The Den Mother flung her beret at him instead. He ducked, and it frisbeed over the bar. They were both too sluggish to care.

"Punk ass," the she muttered, a shabby insult, flipping onto her stomach. Everything felt stiff. Damsel reached for her cell and clicked it awake; nothing. "Too much to ask that shit actually gets done around here. Tell me you guys at least sorted the gun closet last night. I don't want to trip over stray bullets in there if we land in the middle of a siege."

"Yep," he chirped, pretty Toreador nose bouncing _yes_. Damsel was pleasantly surprised. "And let me tell you, it wasn't easy. It was a great big mess. But I went back through after you closed last night and organized everything. Don't look so speechless, hey? There's a haul down there. London hooked us up nice. For an accident."

Damsel grunted. "Cam don't have accidents."

K-Al thought it over; a twiggy finger touched his lips. "No," he decided. "I'm pretty sure that one has had an accident or two."

"Sure. I bet those AKs jam on you."

"Now you're just being bitchy," Playboy needled, and threw a sunny grin with the jaw on the stack of his wrists. Damsel was back to her phone.

"Those people want you killed," she said; that was all.

"Oh, yeah, for sure. But I take everything relatively. I take it in stride. For a morally-bankrupt, mean-machine iron fist of the law, Woeburne is OK," K-Al added, observing the short Brujah face, glancing down at the orange laces on his flat-soled, young-man shoes. "Decent shot, for a clerk. Decent cute. Kind of grouchy, though. You think she's mad at us?"

Another sound from the Den Mother, grouchy enough on its own. Can you blame her? She is bull-horned and brought up on tragedy. People like her know that politically convenient assistance means nothing. Convenience always reeks of betrayal.

Kent-Alan didn't want to fight, though; he just wanted to jab at each other a bit; and you could usually tell when Red's temper was about to swell, tip critical mass, go nova. Besides, she wasn't wrong. With Camarilla and Ventrue, you're always waiting for the shiv in your ribs.

"Whatever," she scoffed, and that's it—the game is over for the night in a flip of a hand and a gouging look from someone who has no heroes anymore. "I'll take the guns. I'll take it. I'll take anything we can use against them."

The door cut their conversation short.

"Who the fuck could that be?" Damsel wondered, flabbergasted someone had actually used the buzzer. Booting-in was generally the preferred mode of entry among Anarchs. The strained, alien sound of the bell made for something unexpected in this pitiable night.

Maybe she should get used to that sound. Maybe she should get used to the notion of having actual kids in these parts again. There wasn't enough time to feel unsure or jealous about her sort-of-Sire's enlistment plan: shock troops, trench recruiting, and new soldiers are all more important than good manners. Damsel figured she'd better mother over any real Childe of Nines Rodriguez, because "mother" was her job title, and care among Brujah is a matter of debt. She had a responsibility. She has a prerogative to guide those who need it, and fuck knows he doesn't have the time...

"This better be the CDC pollboys and not your worthless ghoul." That said, Damsel rolled off their booth and past Kent-Alan, moving to answer.

"You don't really think it's her, do you?" The Toreador shrank in his chair, fingers tightening, brown eyes glistening wide. That fast-finger nonchalance was bleaching now, just a little, behind a sad barrier of sadder furniture with his fingers on his cheeks.

"How the fuck should I know? I don't know what Patty does. All I know is I'm about to answer the fucking door."

"It can't be her. No way. There is no freaking way she found this address. I haven't talked to Patty in months," he promised, tensing, throat tight. "Didn't you tell her I was dead?"

"Hey, bitch-boy—I'm telling you to shut up, get on the wall and hold your gun," Damsel barked. The vampire's t-shirt was rumpled across her breastbone; she wore no kind of protection for herself. "We're not taking any chances. If there's some dipshit hunter on the other side of this door, you better have a fucking scope on him; do you understand? I'm not getting shot tonight. I'm not about to bleed out on my own motherfucking floor."

The Toreador nodded, hefted his Weatherby, and aimed at the place where you'd see a man's throat. Damsel's beret went ignored, abandoned. She thumped behind their vacant bar, retrieved a six-shot pistol, and clicked open the barrel to check. It was full and heavy. Bad energy twanged through the Brujah like a crossbow string. Resolved with the gun in her small hand, she advanced, swung the locks open—her soles stomped the nubby mud mat—one hand went hard around the grip. The trigger was a shock of cold beneath her oppressive finger. She stuck it in front of herself and got ready to show her teeth.

"Damsel. You've got to be Damsel," the man outside blurted, blinking, cross-eyed, at the muzzle glaring inches from his nose.

The sound of her name gave them pause.

The Den Mother didn't flinch. She didn't let the pistol droop, not even an inch. The face outside was startled and deer-eyed. Neither one of them spoke for a minute, not wanting to incite violence until it was due, but there was that sure statement—DAMSEL—right out there, out of his mouth and into the air, like they'd met a dozen times before. A wind blew in late off the Pacific. She glanced him head-to-toe, each standing at the other side of a gun.

Damsel wrinkled her nose. She glowered. She let out a short, irritated puff of air.

The kid standing there on the second stair, out on that sidewalk with no reason to be, was big but passive: paranoid posture; long, drawn features; a slightly off-center bite that dragged the face down. His accent was vaguely Australian. His aura was vaguer—a diluted mash of salt, popcorn, palm leaves and a minor, bottom-feeding strain of beast. Everyone knows this kind of kid. He is Nothing Special. Nothing strange. The boy's hair was a greasy, scorched-sand orange, and his clothes were simple in the way of Army Surplus. His heritage smelled like watered gin.

"That's right," the Den Mother snarled, because why not? She was all rioteer and frizzy scarlet hat-hair. Her kind of cynicism's rooted in impatience and a need to appear large. "I'm Damsel. Who said it? And who the fuck might you be?"

"Look, it probably doesn't matter," he said. The thin-blood was on his toes, literally, an attempt to peek around her stout frame and into the smoggy club to where Kent-Alan stood with rifle in his armpit. She frowned harder. It was a finger dragging across her memory, one the Brujah swore to have seen before. "I understand you're busy. I don't plan on staying. I'm just looking for someone. Can you help me out?"

The half-assed prelude to a question didn't make Damsel happy, exactly, but it flattened her hackles somewhat. She lowered the revolver, but the Toreador behind her was ready to fire at a second's provocation. "This isn't Missing Persons. What the fuck do you want?"

He swallowed, and held his ground. "Listen, my name's E. I'm trying to find my Sire. I know you know her. Lily talked about you all the time."

Damsel stood in the doorway to the only place that she had.

The Den Mother was suddenly uncomfortable. That malicious scowl, lime juice and belt lash, flickered over him twice, searching anxiously, before blinking—hard—shaking her head, and rolling upwards in her skull. It was an insult, yeah. Or it was meant to be, at least. But she shook the moment off, and did not look him in the eye again.

"Jesus," Damsel groaned. She waved down the Toreador behind her, impatient, unfriendly, and somehow reluctant about what there was left to say. He wanted her real attention, that's all. He couldn't get it; she would not let him try. "Figures I'd end up stuck in the middle of this. Look, jack—I'm not going to send you on a goose chase. Yeah, this is The Last Round and I know your Sire. You found the right place. But you're barking up the wrong tree. She doesn't come around here anymore."

"Since when," E snapped before he'd really decided to. The Den Mother sharpened, narrowing her eyes, but a brief something—something that looked contrite, like embarrassment, or like guilt—kept her looking at those two small, flat, candy-red shoes.

"Since a while now," she told him, fidgeting. Damsel folded her arms tightly over her chest. The pistol jutted out of an elbow crease; her shoulder leant huskily against the door frame, blocking him out, not wanting to move. It was like person standing in an updraft of cold. "I don't fucking know. I told you already. I'm not the police. Why don't you take this up with her?"

The Caitiff's unhappiness grew antlers. Before he could think better, or think at all, it was blossoming into a glare. She smashed her arms tighter and glared at her feet. "Don't you think that's occurred to me? I can't get a hold of her and I can't reach her boss so I'm checking here. Really, Damsel. Listen. I don't want to cause trouble for you," he said, gulping the rising alarm back down into his gut. Those roving eyes were plastered wide. She did not look at him, would not do it, could not spare the energy to worry about anyone else that was not part of this Den. "I don't want to get involved with you people. I just want to talk to Lily. Look, is she there? Will you tell her to come out here for a second, please? I only want to make sure she's all right."

"I just told you. I just fucking told you," the Brujah grumbled. Red lips winced into a premature growl, like garnets, her gunless hand unfolding and wringing around the handle of door. "That she doesn't come here anymore. I can't help you. I don't know where she hangs out nowadays, where she's living, or anything about her. And frankly, what she does, or what she wants to do, in no way is this my problem. This is not my problem. This is not on me. So I would appreciate it if you'd turn your shit around get the hell off my damn stoop."

The kid didn't look like he believed her. He stood there a while, whites blazing, fingers folding into fists at either side. _Listen_ , he kept telling her. That word riled Damsel—who had been charitable in talking to a thin-blood; who had been charitable not killing him; who had been charitable tolerating people washed up from nowhere, even the ones asked of her, even when it wasn't her choice and she had not wanted to let herself care. But there was a heaviness in her at hearing her name. It held her arm down, kept it from hauling off and slapping the face looking in to her door. Damsel doesn't need this kind of friendship. But she'd almost allowed Lily to grow on her, anyway. That air-headed, too-tall, gangly bitch, desperate for anything, for someone to see her and say _OK_. She was so useless. My God, was she useless—whining, tripping over her own feet, always asking stupid questions, expecting answers could make her live. Maybe it had just seemed a little different, having fresher blood around this place; having people who could afford to be so helpless, to shake the dirt off their tiny hopes. But she was so _stupid_ , Jesus, so blind-eyed and so fucked. There was no way a baby like that would have ever made it. There was no reason to get attached. Sad, sheepish bitch; she had been so ignorant, she'd actually been scared of Damsel; she'd had this fuzzy, harebrained esteem for the antagonistic way the Den Mother talked, the flak in how she hollered, how a woman with nobody held her ground against everyone else. And there was something else less complicated than that, another kind of admiration, like someone you felt you could trust. Dumb kid—she was so green, so useless—she'd bought the front of all this. She thought Damsel deserved respect.

"I want to talk to Nines Rodriguez," E announced, unmoving, terrified, wanting to be made of steel.

The Den Mother laughed and it sounded like pain.

"Get in line, motherfucker," she barked, and she slammed the door.


	59. Venture Luck

Do you know: free from commitments, bereft of business, and removed from the forest that is vampire politicking, Ms. Woeburne's mind strolls to some strange places.

Or perhaps they weren't so strange. It is not often, you know, that you'll catch a Ventrue idling; it is even less often that a scurrying Foreman allows herself to get bored. Camarilla badges are unaccustomed to leisure. But—whatever the reasons—for the here and the now—a corporal has time to kill _._ Like it or not, as a matter of fact.

And she did not like it.

Hours whittled by without whacking a deadline. Nights passed with no plenary sessions. S.W. hadn't received a LaCroix Foundation envelope since she'd stepped off that plane at O'Hare, and the freedom of it made her feel like she was dangling, like something forgotten needed to be done. Ms. Woeburne paced, wondering what the hell it is she ought to be doing. Unspent energy knotted her nerves. The Foreman had three of those damn school dreams in one week, lurching halfway out of bed to remember, queerly, she hadn't taken a final exam in decades, nor run through a college corridor littered with sun.

As if things weren't already complicated enough for her life, Ms. Woeburne was dreaming about walking around in the day.

Vacation is fine in concept. But frankly—and whatever she's told you—in practice, it doesn't play nicely with her personality. She's a Venture Tower employee; Sears had nothing to offer her. Pouty clubs and lakeview restaurants offered even less. Freshwater vistas are cheap after trial-by-fire on California's coast. The museums might have enticed her once, but they all closed before five, and S.W. wasn't interested in afterhours gate-hopping for the sake of some dusty pterosaur bones. (And, incidentally: _this_ company trooper never wanted to set foot on another pier as long as she lived—Navy, Santa Monica, or otherwise.)

It had come to a point where the Foreman could scarcely walk into a room without taking inventory, and taking its pieces apart. She mapped escape routes, improvised weapons, noted items of intrigue, and identified the vantage points. It felt less like smart now and more like paranoid. It felt odd—and, as the wind blew, and sailboats dinged against white-surf decks, their bells made her eyelids feel heavy where she sat in this arrogant hotel. No ancilla can be too paranoid, can she. Ms. Woeburne could deconstruct it. She could break it apart, separate her environment into quarters, until the world slowed—until she was stone pupil, celery iris, crosshairs—until everything was counted in seconds, measured in how long a novice Patrician manages to survive.

She was breaking apart the contents of her mini-bar when the phone rang.

"Woeburne," it went—like it always did—her cell scooped from a desk corner, held to an ear. The Drake's suites seemed small, making her elbows feel cramped, but they were lavish: oiled mahogany, twisting staircases, Roaring Twenties arrogance. Ridiculous lamp shades, imperial textiles and black steel trefoil dominated her bedroom. Ms. Woeburne understood the afternoon panorama from her floor was spectacular, as well—sun-glare on glassy lake blue—but, for obvious reasons, she did not partake. One can only stare at so much water, anyway.

 _"Oh, good,"_ was Beckett's idea of hello. _"I've decided I'd like to speak with you, young one, regarding this sarcophagus thing."_

No mistaking that simpering and disillusioned voice. Ms. Woeburne sat up straight in her yellow lounge chair, pastel against gray pajama sateen. It was mid-October now, and just enough time had passed to make her seriously consider giving the Gangrel an uninvited business call.

"That's fine," she said. "Fine. Hello. Of course." It was a misordered jumble of points, genuinely relieved. A black-tie's excitement is embarrassing: high pitch, telephone jitters, sudden enthusiasm and pomp. Ms. Woeburne rolled a tiny green vodka bottle between two fingers, the other hand tapping nervously with a fountain pen. The scent of cellophaned cinnamon rolls curdled her stomach, but glazed in pretty, glossy frosting, they looked delectable. She _ahem_ ed. "Answering questions about all this is why I'm here. We can meet as soon as you're able." She stood and reached for the blouse slung over the bedside table, a handful of houndstooth. She shrugged off her housecoat and tugged it on. "Tonight, if it's convenient."

" _Tonight is convenient."_ The Foreman went hopping out of her ugly sweats and into a glum brown skirt.

"Lovely, then," she lied. The Ventrue stuck a hand into her hair and raked bedhead brunette into something remotely alive. "I'll bring along the new documents I've received. Let me know if you need any copies of the last batch, and I'd be glad to take care of it. When would you like to—?"

" _Right about now."_

There was a three-rap knock at the door.

With nothing else to do, Ms. Woeburne crossed the suite, tripped over a pair of shoes, bumped one knee against her bedstead, and answered.

Sure enough: Beckett.

"And here you are," he commented, not-at-all-excited about this fact, stare a sliver of black set in vicious orange. She couldn't see his expression behind the sunglasses, and had to scrutinize the offset mouth, the jet ponytail, the hat that redirected the hallway lamplight. She decided on 'unimpressed.' His hide coat sat in an unwelcoming way.

"Ah. All right. I see. Hello," the Ventrue tried. She winced in defeat. The Gangrel's gaze went mildly downwards.

"Did I come too early this time? Last time I was late," he said, and it occurred to Ms. Woeburne he was probably looking at her bare toes.

"No. No, no," she insisted. "I wasn't expecting you. I mean: Not that it's a problem. I'm happy you responded. Relieved. Well, honored. That's the one." She stopped. She frowned. She bit her tongue, a small corporal punishment.

"I could come back," he suggested, pleasantly, and Ms. Woeburne knew it meant he never would.

"No! No," it was again. _No, no, no_ —that is the people they are. "Just." And here she smiled, lids wrinkling, a sunny grin that made its owner feel like absolute shit. "Just give me a moment to put some shoes on."

She backpedalled from the door—accidentally slammed it on him—and whirled around, groping for socks, lacing up the nearest pair in record speed.

They were boots. Riding boots. Nice, military, colonial black leather boots; the sort of heels you click in, mount a stirrup in, or use to step neatly on somebody's throat. Oh, it was too terrible to stand her.

When the Foreman stumbled back (now fully-dressed), Beckett was still standing there, eyebrows raised. The smile on his face was transitory and unenthusiastic. Having been rudely shut out of LA's business once tonight already, he waited to see if she was prepared for conversation. Ms. Woeburne hovered, blinking rapidly, puzzling out something really redeeming to say.

"So," she decided, flicking out her best company spit-shine. Ventrue charm goes on like a light bulb _'snick!'_ And, like junior officers with obvious boots, it's overpowering—plasticy, chemical, manufactured. "The sarcophagus. It's a project. I'll give it that. Shall we make use of The Drake's executive lounge? I'm sure the night staff will clear it for us if I ask nicely." (Translation:"I'm sure the vacuum-pushing clods can't resist my Dominate." _)_

"If it's all the same, no thank you. This place is too stuffy for my tastes. Makes it hard to breathe," he observed. Woeburne blank-faced until it occurred to her that this was a joke. Beckett rolled his eyes and ushered them on.

"We can sit wherever you'd like," she'd been saying when he cut her off, not needing a footman's approval.

"Let's go for a walk, instead," the Gangrel suggested. "This shouldn't take long, and I'm sure you have other chores on your evening to-do." ( _"Actually… no,"_ didn't seem appropriate, so she held it in.)

They stepped out of the antiquated corridor and into a vacant elevator. There was a bittery look to the archeologist's sarcasm; S.W. kept her mouth shut. It dawned on her that she hadn't brushed her teeth after feeding an hour ago. Ms. Woeburne ended up standing there, arms clamped soldierly at either side, sucking constructively at her enamel and watching the button panel brighten up from _10_ down to _G_.

"I'm not altogether fond of making advance plans where my research is concerned," Beckett informed her. He shouldered through the lift doors and into The Drake's quiet, luggage-strewn lobby with Woeburne trotting after, floor tiles reflecting their angles in sober, sweet-smelling polish. She clack-clacked loudly. It was terribly pretentious, terribly geometric, terribly black-on-white. "But since I realize that you're on a deadline, and I hear Sebastian LaCroix can throw a dreadful temper-tantrum, you may consider me aboard."

Punitive eyes, lemongrass and pessimistic, widened in spite of themselves, surprised in that dim-light lounge. "Are you honestly?" she asked, bristling in a gust of lakefront wind through the doors, too cautious for thank-you or another empty _excellent_. "I mean to say: I understand your misgivings. And how we tend to push. So it's not that I don't appreciate you saying so. But if you need more time to decide. If you aren't positive…"

"You're difficult to please, Los Angeles."

"I'm sorry," she backtracked, lifting an apologetic hand, a clatter of briefcases unloading behind them from a squeaking trolly-car. There was a buzz in the bar where three businessmen drank. Beckett hadn't said much, but you could feel his fine hairs start to bristle and rise. "I am. It's just that, really, you can't know. You can't possibly know how true that is," surged out, and it came, inelegantly, with an anxious shutter of laughter.

The marbled floors were hard beneath her stringy calves. Woeburne was smiling away, palm pressed over her shirt collar, scatterbrained by the knowledge Prince LaCroix was maybe going to accept her back—and he would, really; he practically had to—when they stepped outside, into a damp sweep of street, where the lamplight toasted concrete into bleak sienna sand.

"About the deadline," Beckett wondered, blandly, "or the temper-tantrums?"

"Both." It was automatic. She regretted it instantly.

"I mean to say. Who doesn't? Isn't? On a deadline, that is. Do you know, I was actually thinking of something else." A mortified, freshman _hah-hah-hah_. She tried to recover. It was not very convincing. It was a deep, fresh-smelling city night; the dusk took sleepy, bluish tones. She cursed herself viciously. _Sharp fucking diplomacy, pup._ "Anyhow. We'd be indebted to you, Mr. Beckett—the Prince and his offices—for whatever assistance you're willing to offer. Would you like to speak with the Giovanni excavation manager? I have her number on file, and I'm sure she'd be delighted."

"That won't be necessary." His strides on the sidewalk were long and oddly canine-like. His expression was flat, save for a slight, skeptical smirk at one corner, its natural resting position. "There's nothing a Giovanni could tell me about archeology. Granted, Assyrian burial art is not my area of expertise, but I'll drop a line to some colleagues. That will all come in due time, however. At present, I have a few questions you could answer before I sign my new year away to study in California."

Ms. Woeburne nodded, eyebrows peeking over her glasses frames. They crossed a busy intersection on foot and proceeded another block. Chicago's Dutch elms, traffic lights, cinema butter, and cicadas were a stark contrast to LA's saltwater, citrus, sunscreen. Cars whispered by, perpetual motion in blackness; tires rattled the river bridges, rusty spines from some steampower history. You could breathe in the industry, an ominous musk. Her heels clicked potholes. Everything always seemed wet. "Please, by all means. I'm not a member of the Antiquities Department, myself, but I'll help you with whatever I can."

"I'm sure. But I am curious: How, exactly, did it fall into your Prince's lap?" He must have seen Woeburne hesitate at that, worrying the felt black buttons on her haughty blouse, because Beckett's next remark was a sigh. "No call to fret over LaCroix's secrets, my young Ventrue. I'm not interested in the electorate. And I'll find what I want to know, either way. All you're really doing is saving me a few phone calls. And because you are _so_ exceedingly grateful for and honored by my interest, I think it would behoove you to do me that favor, don't you?"

Ms. Woeburne sighed. She didn't like any of it, to be honest, but flattened out her shirt said "point taken." They had no real destination; the Ventrue kept up as the Gangrel hastened his already uncomfortably quick walking speed. Odd architecture crowded around them with broad brick backs. South of the Loop, as these trains forked away, you could smell where the pretty park districts would soon drop into violence and rot. Condemnation, dripping air conditioners, moldering bathrooms, dried blood; their feet took them toward these. The buildings got bullyish and dull-eyed and square. It felt like a morose place to have to be old.

"I understand Mr. LaCroix was made privy to the sarcophagus dig by an Independent—Ms. Pisha, or so she said—who was visiting on some unrelated business. To be clear: we have no ties with her. The Ankaran tip was part of a small trade, nothing more. She only directed him to the Giovanni, though; I have no idea how they became involved with it."

Beckett spared her a brief glance. "You're certain of this story?"

"Yes, quite certain. I was the middleman caught up in it. And it bears mentioning that the Giovanni have just recently become friendly with our organization. We've had some administrative changes; you'll find out more once you arrive. It should make your investigation easier. Prince LaCroix brought a Giovanni into his Antiquities Department late last month, actually, something I can only assume will assist you. She's been personally charged with ensuring the sarcophagus safely reaches his Domain."

A tumbleweed of newspaper scuttled across the way for her nimble feet to dodge. There was less and less traffic as they moved, and the alleys grew darker, the smells wetter, thicker, suddenly full of something wild. It was an itch like being with Brujah. You could look and feel the intensity sharpened beneath a stare. It was a funnel of anger that outpoured toward your heart. In one moment, nothing said, you could taste the hate.

Beckett didn't look altogether enlightened. "Thank you for volunteering the information, young one, but scientific matters will suffice. I'm really not interested in local politics."

"If I had that luxury," Ms. Woeburne chuffed. "I don't, of course. Clearly. And yes, it's political, but my offer is sincere. If you require anything else—anything at all—please don't hesitate. I've been told to do whatever I can."

Ventrue work like this when they need something. She flattered (albeit badly), then threw a handful of favors on top, easy and crunchy like sunflower seeds, looking clever and diligent, following him around a weed-grown overpass. A scrawny jackrabbit sprung through chain-link and off into a gutter. The late-night crowds became dangling pockets of life as they cut through narrow streets, off downtown's beaten mainways. Eventually, their only company was the tired bodies, the half-souls, navigating dry nooks with cagey eyes. Skyscrapers devolved into soggy apartments and discount office space. Wind pressed noisily into fire escapes. Parking garages loomed. There didn't seem to be enough lamp light, though the number of posts was sufficient; the safety itself was not. Motes swarmed in the air and tweaked fine hairs, bare skin. This is the thick kind of dark with an appetite. Ms. Woeburne felt tasted and she did not enjoy the premonition of being somebody's meal.

"Prince LaCroix also insists," the Foreman continued because he did not. She wished her face would not glow in the little moon there was. Train cars rattled behind them in busier latitudes of a prisonish grid. "That I make sure you're aware of how much he appreciates your efforts. He regrets being unable to convene in-person, and promises his undivided attention once you arrive in Los Angeles. I, too, am much obliged."

Beckett's response to Camarilla obligation was to reach over, nonchalant, and pull a dust-bunny from the poorly combed mess of its spokesman's hair.

The action made her just about as miserable as he'd guessed it would. She watched the lint tuft flick away, dismayed, stuck in a sort of dumb resignation to being a corporate buffoon.

"And as I was—I was saying," Woeburne puttered out, slumping, and for a brief moment, she could almost sort of see herself. She could almost see the pomp; the fake, crinkly, snake-oil salesman Foundation smile; and the shiny-shoe reflection of a hundred little corporals with shallow big-name, corner-office, East Empire dreams.

She let out a big gust of air.

"Well," Ms. Woeburne decided. "I guess I don't need to say it again."

She gulped a rock ball of saliva. The whole thing was starting to hurt in a very weird way.

"Just. Feel free," Woeburne bid, soberly. "Feel free to investigate on your own, at your leisure. Once we have the artifact, Mr. LaCroix will gladly fund your research, and I'm certain he'll want to be hands-on. Until then, any and all points of interest can be sent directly to me. The Foundation will, of course, compensate you generously."

"Of _course_ you will," Beckett said, his placating tone eerily similar to a maths teacher Ms. Woeburne once had. She frowned there on the cement like the bruised little prefect she was. "I'll probably head west somewhere within the next three months. If I find anything I think will interest your people, you can have at it then. Prior to that _then_ , however, I kindly request _not_ to be bombarded by messages from the LaCroix administration."

"I understand," the administrator told him robotically. "I will be in touch when the sarcophagus arrives."

"Excellent. I hope your Prince is as understanding as you are." The Gangrel adjusted his spectacles, then tugged out a coat collar crease. "Science doesn't tick away on a company clock. And I, personally, don't get along well with supervisors or their deadlines. Fortunately—as you've already noted—I have the privilege of not giving a damn."

Woeburne managed to smile a bit. From her lackey's post—from her cufflinks, her click-pens, and her spit-shined company badge—it was difficult to sink one's teeth into the notion of being an apolitical vampire. Order is the conduit through which their world works. A predator cannot avoid that reality, could not shirk it, anymore than they avoid being seen by cleverer prey. Still, one had to love the way Beckett talked. His was an arrogant, indolent intelligence that differed from the cool and dismissive conceit Sebastian swung around. As ghastly as her performance had been tonight, Ms. Woeburne found herself liking the sighing old academic. "Liking" didn't help her appreciate, of course, how a solitary person might go about securing a safe, neutral, nonviolent niche in Jyhad.

Safe, neutral.

Non-violence.

In retrospect, the Foreman realized she ought've learned not to think these things by now.

Three bullets had splattered around them before the Ventrue could react. One twanged a light post, ripping through rust, disappearing down the block. A second plunged into a nearby fire hydrant, gushing sewer water onto summer pavement. The third and final shot whistled forward, popped a stitch on Ms. Woeburne's shoulder pad, and very precisely struck Beckett somewhere in the vicinity of his left shoulder.

It was a sort of slow-motion. She watched the vampire's arm snap back through a haze of deafness. His glasses flew off and clattered somewhere onto the quiet street adjacent. Two perfect drops of blood bounced into the air and dispersed.

One of these days, Ms. Woeburne was going to stop tempting the Fates like this. The rounds whistling by—each of them a neat little punctuation to interrupt some Camarilla assumption—were good incentive. They sounded farther away than they were. They sung close to her head. And they made the Foreman feel quite assured, then, of this whole predator thing being a curse, of some supreme mastermind behind it all. Maybe there really was some divine Ancient—some smug, smirking Lilith—kicking back on a Gehenna wind to orchestrate the lesser demons' brief, bumbling, erratic lives.

And you know, whoever she was, She absolutely fucking despised Ms. Woeburne.

There was no mist of panic this time. The Ventrue's vision remained incredibly clear. She determined the gunfire's origins were somewhere behind her and split up a second to scan the rooftops, scouting for cover from rifle fire. A newspaper dispenser would do. Then, with no decorum since there wasn't time for any, the Foreman lurched forward and over it. Her palm heel caught one corner. Rusty legs jutted skyward when the piece upended, scraping loudly against cement, a makeshift barricade. She was not aware of who grabbed whose flailing arm; one blur of motion, and Ms. Woeburne was crouching with Beckett against the crumbling sidewalk, this toppled bit of utility the best shelter they could find.

"Beckett—my god, are you all right?" barely cleared her throat before a window shattered in the dry, dour business complex overhead. S.W. ducked, shoulders to earlobes. She cussed fiercely at herself for having left her firearm locked in the suite. Adrenaline went throbbing through the Ventrue's system and she could not risk moving, not for anything, not even to help him. All there was to do was speak.

"Beckett," she asked again.

And there he was, kneeling beside the frightened Foreman, looking—though it confused her greatly—like a man remotely surprised. He glanced around for his lost spectacles, dabbing at what damage had been done to him. Wet burgundy opened the simple clothing, one cherry pie spot. From their current position, hunkered behind a partition made of newspapers and tin, Ms. Woeburne couldn't ascertain how badly he'd been injured.

The Gangrel didn't seem too terribly fazed by lead in his breastbone, however. By the time she reached out to apply pressure—and oh, god, this was awfully familiar; she knew he must be easier to touch than an Anarch; she hoped his color of red wouldn't be so dreadfully animal dark—Beckett was already on the up-and-up. He stiffened briefly, plucking two splinters out of solidified flesh. The bullet had apparently broken on contact with tissue; it split, hammering dully into exterior muscle, sinking no farther than that. Fortitude had cut it to the quick. The scholar studied them disinterestedly before dropping both bits to the asphalt.

"That actually stung," he declared, more ruffled than wounded, and brushed off the stained lapel. Beckett looked down at himself, hunting, offhandedly, for scratches. She was not sure if the Gangrel's concern was for his coat or his flesh. "Do you know someone in particular who'd like us dead, young one?"

Ms. Woeburne considered this question as much as one being shot-at can consider questions, gave up on finding a right answer, and did the only thing she could in their present situation. The Ventrue heaved out a whimsical, self-depreciating sigh.

"Oh, no," she replied. Car brakes squealed somewhere down the abandoned side street. "Not, you know, _particularly_."

They crouched there another handful of minutes, neither speaking nor shifting, until it went quiet. Either the assailant left in a hurry or depleted his ammunition, because the block woke back up, slowly, looking for signs that it was all right to keep on. Bored night birds began twittering their restlessness; city rodents shuffled tree leaves. She was sure the gunshots, a familiar but never unimportant sound, had caught human attention, which would mean 9-1-1 calls, which would mean police—but right now, nobody wanted to be the first to flick on their lights. S.W. had instinctively reached for a gun that wasn't there four or five times before she could feel untargeted again. The Gangrel patted his bruise like one might dust off a scraped knee.

Beckett, who was quite over the would-be homicide, stood up, took a look around, and pulled Ms. Woeburne to her feet by one forearm.

"Damn it," she swore, toe catching a sidewalk crease, and then she swore again, not bothering to control her nerves. There was a tremor working up the Foreman's fingers, blossoming at each elbow. Gravel stuck to both hips of her skirt. Loose hair wafted around a scowling, startled face. She did not care if there was lint in it. Needing something to busy her hands, Ms. Woeburne began to clean—tidying, straightening, swiping at the scuffs of those neat black boots.

"What on earth," she cursed again—and then they were walking, not wanting to wait on the cops, not hurrying (for these cops do not run for gang violence in the hard parts of town)—and it was a curse, though it was not a cuss at all. "I can't imagine why. I have no inkling, no inkling," the corporal promised. "There would be no point. I'm carrying nothing. I'm not stupid; I don't know why they'd think that of me. I've got nothing in this city. I've got nothing in the Midwest. I've stepped on nobody's toes. There's no reason. There's really no reason at _all._ "

"Come, now. There must be _some_ reason. Else why waste the bullets?" Beckett might have been trying to help. He was not, and she glared—at him, at the butcher of a city, at no one in particular who had just attempted to force her brains out of her skull

Woeburne breathed in-out, faculties spinning. She readjusted her glasses with violent, bothered hands. She snorted, and snorted again. Two digits massaged the Foreman's temples. The Gangrel did not interrupt; he let her deliberate, demystify, deflate the tension like a tapped balloon. "No one died. No one's hurt. At least there's that. But—oh, _no_. No, there's not that. You were shot. Oh, God damn it, what a mess. It's a perfect fucking mess."

"Not a perfect mess," he observed, generously. "It would've been much more perfect if they'd actually shot something out of me."

It was going to be fine. It was an imperfect mess. It was going to look stellar on her report. She stopped, suddenly, in the alley they found, and grabbed apologetically for one of his arms, but it felt less like _I'm sorry_ , and more like a deputy commanding _stop_. "I am so sorry. I am so sorry about this, Beckett. I really—I don't know what happened. I don't know anyone. Not here. In Chicago. I don't even see how it's possible; the Ankaran file is classified. Top-level. This was a fluke. Has to be. It was a fluke, or it was a—no, that wouldn't make sense. None of it does. None of it ever makes any bloody sense until it's over."

And then she was walking again, face tilted down, furious, eyes alive in their peripherals, not wanting to see it happen again. He watched the ancilla storm, mouth compressed into a harried line, lipstick bleeding into rain-warped plum. She murmured unintelligibly to herself. There was something to be counted off on the five fingers of one smudged left hand. A cuss, a brood, perpetual frustration, unpent.

"Perhaps they'll have demands," Beckett wondered, another half-hearted help.

She sighed. There were neat nail marks where she'd pinched the bridge of her nose. "I don't know; I've got no intel; I've got none at all. Anyway," the Foreman snapped. They turned another random corner. Controlled randomness—this is the safest way to get yourself lost from somebody else. "What does it matter. I can't ask them. They're gone. Whoever they are, they're long gone now."

Beckett glanced past the trainwreck of Ventrue, focused down one clattering alleyway, and sniffed the air.

"Don't worry," he said, conversational as ever. The Gangrel offered his lazy almost-smile. "I'll get them."

"We ought to head back to The Drake," Ms. Woeburne murmured, and as she did so, the Ventrue's eyes reached through these leaking apartments—took apart the toothed glass, lighted windows, opened clues. They took apart the possibilities. They did not shy or blink. They broke apart.

But by the time they put it back together, Beckett was nowhere to be seen.


	60. Jaw of the Wolf

It was a halfway pleasant night for a hunt.

The autumn moon was high and waxing, freckled overcast purple. The humidity was alive with lakefront breeze. Cool light peeked between the bullish silhouettes of fat foundries and skyscraper bone; cicadas complained; and the mustiness of park trees promised rain. Weather stirred small nature from tall grass, and chased most people off the open veins of street.

A dark run through a wet city after some amateur assassin was considerably easier on Beckett's nerves than the shot had been. Easier on his poor feet, too.

Paws, to be specific.

Anyway: sixteen toes or ten, it's simple business. Young Gangrel carry with them, much like one might carry cigar musk on a coat, that particular unwashed aroma of dewclaw, dander, and dead cats. Beckett, who was neither young nor unwashed (and who didn't like the taste of cat), scented it quickly. His breastbone recovered, and that was lucky, because if a cartridge had punctured a lung instead of a shoulder, this old hunter's mood would be much less agreeable about Chicago and Los Angeles, roll them together in one sticky ball. But the shot had been a few centimeters off, and cleanup would be a piece of cake. Just follow your nose, really.

Beckett wasn't worried. Not honestly. He was vaguely interested in knowing who thought an artifact was worth executions, though—perhaps LaCroix's high-strung gopher hadn't been entirely incorrect (or entirely lying) when she wondered if it was all some slaphappy fluke. Or she hadn't been honest, and one's never wrong to assume dishonesty from a Ventrue, bless their little pebble hearts. Still, not a bad idea to find out which sect might like him dead.

Towers loomed tightly together at his left, the rim of downtown; on the right, moonlit green space stretched between Lake Michigan and the city core, punctuated by the sear of streetlamps, carved with lonely jogging paths. They were cold and smooth against the pads of his feet, smelling of the sneakers that had been there hours before. A well-meaning beat officer in the hazy glow of shorefront called _here-boy, here-boy_ , but Beckett didn't stop running, and he didn't come here.

Incidentally, you wouldn't believe how often passersby mistook his canine form for a large domestic—Alaskan mix, perhaps—which made running in this body easier than walking the human one. Most physical activity, to be honest, for the white wolf was stronger and heavier than his birth body, more limber, less likely to slip on a banana peel. Mortals saw him lope past, a mutt with a purpose. Some of them were good souls and stuck fingers in their mouths to whistle him over, look for a dog tag, bring a lost hound home. Beckett did not mind this, and might've made a decent dog, he imagined, in another life.

But for this one, it's best to keep moving; he's a good bloodhound, but he plays a very poor game of fetch.

So it was hand-claps echoing behind him, another four-block jaunt, a sharp right hook up one grimy cul-de-sac, then a scrape under broken chain-link and _ta-da!_

The sharpshooter slid vividly down the emotional spectrum with two paws planted on his unsuspecting back, one at either scapula. Clearly they'd risked no one important in this cockamamie bid. Poor scraggly wretch was full of yelps and squeals, though, and his muscle hunched tight as it would go, stomach hitting the damp asphalt; he made a sullen ' _thwump'_ in a derelict side-street. Scared sounds rattled off close walls made from windows and brick. He somersaulted onto his back as the white wolf rebounded—a Childe, sore and surprised, staring down danger, its form a sinewy lupine outline in this cramped alley that whirled around to pounce again.

This time, it hit him full on in the chest. Shaggy yellow hair whipped into a puddle. Two handgun bursts flared uselessly into the cluttered soup of sky before his pistol went clattering. Flimsy neonate Protean grew talons that slashed, viciously, at the attacking muzzle; but, unable to deter it, they withdrew, making a final, prey animal attempt to guard the vulnerable eyes and throat.

Oh, well. 'A' for effort, anyway.

Here's how a boy looks into the face of a wolf. He doesn't—not directly—but winces, eyes squinted into livid, pitiable files, trying to see sky beyond the mane. Dull claw oppressed each shoulder, ruffling fabric there. And the teeth—the wolf's teeth, you can trust. They were inches from the flattened human face, tusklike pale, whiskered lips pulled back into a wicked snarl, tongue frothing false rabies, hamming it up. Here's the part where a good wolf will usually bark that boy out of his skin. But barking, Beckett guessed, would've also scared the liquids out, and this whole affair was already troublesome enough, so tonight's wolf settles for a blood-curdling growl. Silvery hair bristled in a ridge along the tall, sloped haunches. He shook.

_"You're not a very good shot,"_ the Elder observed, and it came out a lingering, pointed gnarr. The young one made a buckler of both elbows and hoped his jugular wouldn't be pulled out.

Lying there, terrified as he was, the child's argument was an inarticulate hodgepodge, omega grumbles and puppydog yaps. Dark, wild pupils were already rolling madness, the kind that caribou feel as their ankles are buckled, and they fall, saliva rolling on the first taste of death. It wasn't the proudest image. Then again, was it ever?

Beckett placed one paw atop that trembling voice box and pushed. Two nails dented the delicate skin. He gave a final toothy rumble—just for good measure—before shrugging off his animal cloak and reassembling into the original body underneath. When all four lupine feet were again palms and heels, fur coat replaced by clothing, moon-white hanks thickened to black locks and the long snout retracted back to a long nose, business could be done. (Well, "business," anyway; the neonate was still jibbering on his own fish of a tongue.)

Beckett's hand grew back its knuckles, the skeleton of them wrapped around a skinny neck. He stood, hefting the pitiful thing easily, then twisted around and slammed its back against a cement wall. The gesture was so coolly calm it petrified that trapped, fledgling body; the mortar and the impact did the rest.

"You broke my glasses," he remembered, a little annoyed. It was a terrifying pout. "Sadly for you, they're the only causality of your little ambush. Would you like to tell me who sent you on this suicide mission?" The once-wolf's palms were burning, sinister energy. The boy's hair curled unnaturally; blond tangles singed. Fingernails, uselessly grasping at the forearm that held them, went colorless and they threatened to crumble.

Don't typecast Beckett. Even well-traveled Gangrel enjoy a good old-fashioned beating session, he was sure. But swatting gnats like the one dangling before him became unsatisfying very quickly. Once you spend so many decades sniffing out unkind truths, it's only truly spectacular (or spectacularly just) violence that entertains you, and even then, it is a base, guilty pleasure. Personally, he prefers pondering sarcophagi to menacing stupid children.

If you were to ask Beckett: When it comes to exterminations, fast and somewhat painless is by far a better route for everyone than slow, languorous, and matted with gore.

Somewhere behind all that squalling and stumbling and _please-oh-please_ -ing, the neonate seemed to be passing this whole botched affair off as an accident. His Elder almost laughed at the obvious deception.

"Oh, was it? I see. You'll have to explain to me how one accidentally assassinates. Or, by 'accident,' were you referring to missing your shot?" the old Gangrel asked, one eyebrow cocked. His catch wriggled like a trapped rat. Beckett broke his leg.

There came a great number of gasps and some suffocated weeping when the heel of his boot cracked bone. Crying, actually; tears included. When the child calmed down enough to speak, and the white wolf was no longer wedging his toe into the meaty, bloodless wound he'd laid, their conversation began. He let the boy drop down to the floor. His leather shoes faced rubber ones on damp concrete. But Beckett didn't let go of his neck.

"That's not," it said—then "No, no"—and, finally, "I didn't." And then it wheezed, a protest that couldn't really be deciphered or heard. (This made the historian impatient. His leg had barely crunched at all.)

"Except it was," Beckett corrected, more irritated than he was a moment ago. "And you did. Hate to rub salt in the wound, but for the sake of constructive criticism. The whole thing was, by all accounts, a disaster. And it wasn't exactly—"

"Planned," the neonate spat. It landed in a hoarse, wet, reddish smack at Beckett's feet. "Not planned; not like that. Fuck," he cussed; his Elder winced again, disliking the vulgarity. "We weren't aiming for you," he begged, a high-pitched sneeze of a sound when the clutch around his throat tightened. A thumb was currently crunching into the lymph node. Red welts like sunburn blistered around each unforgiving finger. "I swear. I swear to God. They didn't tell me anything; I didn't—I had no clue, no kind of clue—" And it was a nice enough performance, but it was getting monotonous. The rapid-fire pleas were easily fractured by another callous squeeze.

' _Gunning for a Prince's secretary, then?'_ Beckett poached this notion in his head. It was a rather unexpected turn.

Normally, tips divulged by a flea-bitten, gagging child are suspect, but he could smell the unsightly reek of mortal fear on him; it was thick enough to believe his confessions, jumbled as they were. You might suppose that anti-establishment spirit doesn't matter greatly to an apolitical creature, and you'd be right, but he imagined a certain Camarilla emissary might be interested. Ventrue of all ages and sizes tend to react poorly when told their names are penned on someone's black list. It's the equivalent of informing a pep clique that people exist who don't worship their footsteps in _Pleasant Valley High_ 's Astroturf; they always squeal like schoolgirls. And he imagined a skittish, crinkly Foreman might actually be a little bit frightened by the news someone desired her dead.

Or did they? Well, after the poor thing came all this way merely to chat ancient history, the least Beckett could do was figure out which faction wanted her ashes airlocked in a tin can.

"You're Sabbat, aren't you?" he supposed.

The wretched child in his knuckles was caught midway between bawling and going limp like a wilt of leek. His Adam's apple gave an ungainly, wordless jiggle.

"A rhetorical question, then," the wolf noted. "Too bad. I hate those."

The boy didn't nod, but shook, a sudden clattering of incisors one could probably take as a valid "yes." Sort of disappointing, the Sabbat. They were a terribly, terribly conventional culprit, and convention often exasperates explorers for the potential it loses you. Generally speaking, infant Gangrel have only so many options in choosing an organization these nights. Still, is a small grain of innovation every so often too much to ask of the next generation?

_'Apparently so,'_ Beckett noted, answering his own question again, wrinkling the bridge of his donnish, pencilish nose. The sorry state of twenty-first century vampirism made his temples go all achy. The chances of some dashing young adventurer out there ever filling his shoes were looking slimmer all the time. _'Oh, my grandfather was right. It is an awful imposition to finally grow old.'_

At least the Kindred world couldn't afford to kill him off just yet.

"Anyway, I apologize for asking. Of course you're Sabbat." Knowing this, Beckett skipped most of the interview. "And your Ductus would be where? Whatever passes for an address. I could just as easily tear his or her location from the husk of your head, mind you, but this way is much less fatal," he tossed in for good measure. (A flaming lie, but those accustomed to cult theatrics are more likely to understand ultimatums when they come wrapped in a big bloody bow.)

When the child refused to betray his leaders—a patriot, bound and toasted to a fault—Beckett shrugged, cut his losses, then threw him screaming onto a stretch of blacktop, and stepped on his neck until it popped. There was a burst beneath a boot heel. Embers wafted. A sizzling odor replaced the stink of fear.

The Gangrel dusted ash from his trench flaps.

How dramatic.

On a positive note: this shouldn't be too difficult.

Beckett picked up one of the dead(er) lad's shoes and scanned for abnormalities. Athletic sneaker—shoddily built, generic make—with sagging stitches and cement circles rubbed into the sole. The treads had been jogged into nonexistence. This was not telling on its lonesome, but there also appeared to be some strange, shimmering substance rubbed into the material; small freckles gleaned against black dye. The wolf scratched at it with a nail, rubbing loose traces between thumb and palm. Dirt stuck to his pads. Fingers. Whichever.

_'Coarse texture, sandy, not much in the way of silt… offshore plot, most likely. Looks to be of high quartz content. Lakefront, it is. And is this sawdust? Curious.'_ One last hint: a peachy scale wedged into a heat-crack.

The neonate had sported a cotton t-shirt. Beckett picked it up, sifting off the human residue, and sniffed. Smoke. Powerfully so, but not of the nicotine variety, which is lighter and more floral to the tastebuds. He took another whiff, looking like a purveyor of fine wines. Beckett would've hated this comparison, but for all his insight and perception, the great detective couldn't see his own face. It was probably a good thing. _'Steel-work? No, too earthy. Lumberyard? Wrong city. Oak, perhaps?'_ There was a thick miasma of burning wood, and a peaty, mossy flavor underscored by some subtle sweetness. Tree sap, possibly. Or a slow-roast, watery meat.

_Ah-ha._

Delighting in what a wonderful invention the internet is—tomes are heavy, dusty, and slow—Beckett called up a list of local fish markets on his cellular phone. There were only a handful, and he chose the functional smokehouse: an aged, chimneyed brick building in a grassy northwest pocket of homes. _'Old monsters can howl to the moon just as much as they'd like about technology,'_ the old monster thought contentedly to himself, watching triangulation unfurl in the cup of his hand. Perhaps it was spoiling adolescent minds; the Digital Age redeemed itself by making easy tasks easier, leaving more energy for genuinely difficult question-marks. Besides, Beckett believed anyone who honestly regarded the Dewey Decimal System as high art was either a librarian or an anal-retentive horse's ass. _'Satellite imaging beats crinkled atlases by candlelight any day of the week.'_

(And, well, he would know.)

Not feeling like another eight-mile pant, the Gangrel took a cab down I-90, hopping off into the red-light congestion of Lawrence Avenue. He paid the driver (who was too busy to notice anything unearthly about his passenger), stepped into shadow, and—after a quick privacy glance each way—melted back into a four-legged thing.

The briny scent of a salmon kitchen was potent, even afterhours; Beckett needed only follow the headiness of charcoal and freshwater flesh. It led him through a couple weedy construction sites, where concrete pebbles spiked uncomfortably between doggie toes, then around one deadly quiet public elementary school. He trotted neck-down across an unlit playground. The smells of children confused the target odor momentarily. Corn syrup, Silly Putty, urine, Crayola shavings. With pink playground chalk on his feet, over hopscotch and remnants of sack lunches, the hound pressed on for five more peopleless blocks. Unlit bungalows; sleeping families; insects in drooping, crated neighborhood trees. His only sentient encounter was with a pair of loose saddleback German Shepherds, who lurched antagonistically up from the business of digging before sensing something horribly wrong with this trespasser and permitting him pass.

Beckett didn't quite make it to the smokehouse, actually. He didn't need to. As luck would have it, this humble path led him straight past a sore thumb condo complex, stamped condemned, nestled eerily in a seedy alleyway just meters away from the source of that powerful reek.

Sturgeon spines, alewife fillets, shredded gills, shaven blades. All of that fishy stuff blended with the odd, supernatural musk next door, a sanguine tang decidedly _not_ marine in nature. Bingo. Abandoned apartments crumbling into waste are no strange sight in a metropolis called out for its Big Shoulders, granted, but there was a trademark festering about this one that would give any Kindred pause. Fresh meat. Bleach. Burnt hair. Mania lives in rusted chains, a mucusy smell, hide and decay. Makeshift metal shields had been hammered over every window in the five-story place, some of them glassless. Gunpowder brewed the air around it. Dumpsters stank of walleye bones that masked the toxic scents nearby. Nine-foot-high Safety and Sanitation chain-link stood angrily around the building, gagging a thatch of tiger lilies, its far corner stripped open by wire-cutters. There even appeared to be a homemade landmine hidden under several dandelion clods.

This was most definitely the place.

It was still early, about eleven o'clock. A few precursory scans suggested a small pack, mostly out hunting or otherwise raising amuck. From the outside, at least, a breach looked simple. Simplicity normally made Beckett suspicious, but Sabbat aren't exactly well-celebrated for their forethought. _'Neither are they usually praised for their defense,'_ the Gangrel knew, feeling reasonably confident and fairly unmoved. Any other supernatural hate-club, and he might've wondered if the whole thing was a trap. These? No. It was a sitting duck.

Beckett scented the air one last time, watched for any signs of movement, then ducked under that wrenched-up leaflet of fence. The metal latticework printed muddy hexagons on a furred hip.

He loped to the compound's rear entrance, stepping gingerly to avoid explosives, considered it, and clambered a rickety fire escape to floor three. Soft canine heels made no sound. Storming in and slaughtering everyone might've been all-in-a-day's-work for a Gangrel of his age and exceptional talent, but it was tasteless, and took more exertion than he wanted to spend. A person could, after all, be injured (again)—and, just for your log book, crossing blades with Sabbat is rarely worth the personal risk. Beckett had grown pretentious enough to consider himself _above_ most fighting by the time he'd reached Elder status. Much neater to sneak in and nip off their heads as necessary, like old marigolds in a garden full of weeds.

He wedged his nose beneath an unhinged window and forked it open. The glass gave way with a quiet squeak and revealed the black space inside.

The wolf climbed through into a dark and empty room.

It had once belonged to a young person, perhaps. Off-white carpet mildewed on a wooden floor, and a single-size bedstead was missing its mattress. The current tenants used this space for storage. Cardboard boxes were piled high along the perimeter; hastily-shed clothing had been slung over available furniture; ammunition boxes sat on dresser drawers. Spent gold shotgun shells were stacked along a child's bookshelf like trophies. Someone's lampshade—just the shade, for it lacked an actual bulb—had been tossed, callously, into a cobwebbed corner.

There was a sadness to it, really. The settling of rot, this creeping loss of color. The bluebird wallpaper had been left to decay, the mouse tunnels were yawning into caverns, and liquid plaster dried in messy globules over a bullet-punctured stretch of paint. It smelled very disagreeable in here, as well, as a briny haze from the smokehouse commingled with that nonspecific Sabbat stench. Hyenas, ammonia, and death. He had whiffed it many times.

The Gangrel hunkered, crept silently on his belly to the chamber door, and peered around.

It was a quiet sleeping area that opened into one long townhome hallway. At its closest end, a sandy stairwell creaked downwards; at its far end, there was a strange, mechanical glow burning softly out from some small den into which he could not see. Houseflies plinked against anemic nightlights. Carpet squares of many patterns and sizes had been tossed together to make a single runner, gathering footprints and stains; they were circus reds, petal pinks, baby's room blues. Washcloths had been stuffed into a few of the more noticeable rat holes. Four other bedrooms were closed along this claustrophobic hall, all shut and locked, but there were no other sources of light. He could see where rug fibers had been ripped from that squeaky set of stairs. Two floors overhead, three below.

No need to wander down the mainway. Beckett edged a little farther out and twisted his thick, maned neck towards the nondescript light bloom at the corridor's head. It was a boring, staticy hum. The white wolf listened closely, left ear twitching. A computer? Yes, that sounded right, but there was no one at the helm; it was idling, stuck on a screensaver, waiting for someone to shake it awake. He slid another foot forward, craning for a better look. This hall ended in what probably used to be someone's studio in its glory days: a plain chamber, old book musk wafting beneath carrion. And, sure enough, there was the pixel blue wash across the purplish rug.

Beckett rather wanted to know what the Recycle Bin of a Sabbat computer looks like. He darted across the hallway, pressed his body against a far wall, and slunk forth, tail low, careful to keep his claws from tapping the floorboards.

Three more cautious steps and a human shadow twitched. Not human, exactly. It was the toes of a barefoot Priestess. They were five in count, female, and connected to an ankle that dangled over a wilting red sofa's edge, kicked back comfortably, just into his view. There were black rings gleaming dully on each. Beneath the pervading aroma of mollusks, Beckett picked her scent clearly from here: varnish, mold, road-rash, warm rubber, and cheap nail polish. Not quite Brujah. Not quite Gangrel. Certainly not Lasombra or Tzimisce. And a hair's width off from Ravnos neonate, provided he could actually recall what one smelled like. _'Madam Ringleader would be a Malkavian, wouldn't she?'_

The Portage Park mistress was sprawled across her pathetic couch like a seer on a divan, with a full yard of black hair sprawled over an armrest. She looked seventeen, all elbows and over-the-counter antihistamines. She was roundabout that brusque Angeleno corporal's age.

_Bah._ No one else was home. Best to just bull's-rush in and sedate the fledgling.

Beckett stood his prey up with loud sigh, waited until the ancilla was dumbly facing him through a veil of darkness, and leapt for her pallid strand of throat.

The muzzle hit first—big bite, White Shark horsepower. Her vision was subsumed by two hundred pounds of silvery beast lunging through the lightless condominium, and he gave her no opportunities. The wolf made contact before any possible defense. His fangs slid into the expanse of neck, sure and practiced, tearing blood free. And they clenched. Skin left muscle in distressed ribbons, caught in his teeth; when she shook him off, there was little left to the gullet. Tubes dangled, a flood running down her loose summer dress. The shaken Priestess stood back up, because shock let her do nothing else—jaw wagging, cords tangling into a silky collar. She stared at the dog where he crouched, menacingly, in the only exit.

Beckett watched the horror fizzle to fury in opaque, far-seeing eyes.

The next moment, when his paws were touching solid ground, she raged into frenzy, upended the couch. They struck carpet in a tangle of limbs.

_'Spectacular juggernauts, but poor tacticians,'_ he'd tell you of the antitribu, as Beckett struggled to keep his own windpipe out of harm's way. He lost her rapid fists to an Obfuscate vapor, but found them again when four wild knuckles dug into his abdomen, eliciting a nasal yelp from the old white wolf. A fast Malkavian, admittedly. She gouged with knuckles and used her hard points. Knees, caps, ball-and-sockets; the Gangrel retaliated by clamping unforgiving jaws around one milky forearm. Scarlet slithered between his molars and leaked from the jowls.

She did not seem to feel the pain. Snarling, the Priestess flipped them over in order to separate herself from these teeth, grabbing feverishly at the furniture legs. Her hands were in want of a cudgel. Beckett was thrown, and then there was a flat beringed foot in his stomach, and it sent him airborne; he launched off a wall to avoid being whipped into it. Blood trickled from the long canine mouth. There was no time to regain his footing, though; the Malkavian moved too quickly, even with a gluttonous bite taken out of her throat. A lip of the television monitor she swung nearly caught him—would've likely shattered his ribcage—but instead glanced off a recliner and splintered. Tiny glass shards exploded and bounced off his husky coat. A handful hit, nipping Beckett's lean forelegs, but they weren't dangerous; they were just a little hard to ignore. He hopped a patch of sharp bits and shivered the others away.

Having humored enough for tonight, the Gangrel soaked up one final crunchy kick, dove beneath her, and rose, bipedal, himself again—or perhaps his secondary self—whichever you prefer.

True to the Malkav prerogative, this change in shape seemed to encourage the Priestess. Perhaps she thought she'd forced him into it; perhaps she simply wasn't a fan of dogs. Either way, the child bared her not-so-pearly whites and sprang for his chest. He could have dodged it, probably. But there was no call this late in the scrape, he was feeling tired, and despite his best efforts to be conservative, it looked like he was going to have to spend a bit of blood.

A well-placed slap turned her face away. And then there was an intangible fist hammering the fledgling heart-first into a square of pine parquet with bone-snapping force. It was an anvil of nothing; impossible, vague weight pressed down against that Beast, squeezing it out of her like a punch in the gut lobsters your breath away. There was suddenly just a madwoman left, and she squirmed like tweezed beetles, cruor bubbling from nostrils and mouth.

It's just a little magic. A teaser, a trick, something an out-of-towner picks up after a visit or two to good friends. Beckett has an interest in knowledge—all kinds—especially the forbidden ones. Doors closed to others often squeaked open an inch for him. But, for all that, he didn't see the point in wasting more time or more blood, and dropped the TV on her head.

Unnecessary? Sure. But Beckett felt everyone was entitled to a little overkill once in a blue moon.

He listened in the dripping, simmering dark for a few moments, waiting for backup, for noises downstairs. Skin bits popped to dust on the diamond-print rug. No one else came.

' _That should do it,'_ Beckett decided, just for himself, and stepped gingerly over the cinders. He situated himself at her purring computer. He jiggled it on.

With nothing else to stop him and no one else to fight, blood-soaked, the white wolf flexed his ten fingers and got to it—noting, parenthetically, that he probably ought to see about ringing LaCroix's patsy before her head imploded.

' _She can wait a few more minutes,'_ Beckett decided, plucked a flash drive from his coat pocket, and stole everything worth learning.


	61. Borrowing Jacks

Ms. Woeburne could tell, from the short time they'd spent together, that Mr. Beckett was not a man for datebooks.

The Gangrel had accrued what you might call a popular reputation for bad timing. He'd be late, or he'd be early, or he'd be uninvited entirely and still show up on your doorstep, a cuneiform whosit or whatsit in hand, head firmly stuck in that old Indiana hat. It follows that Ms. Woeburne was not altogether surprised when, seconds after an assassination attempt in downtown Chicago, he dashed off into darkness with little more than a "don't worry" and a dogprint in the grass.

Still, understanding this: it would be nice if someone stuck a damn chip in the white wolf's neck.

Ms. Woeburne left three messages. She clipped back to The Drake and waited for him to phone her. And, as you know by now, waiting is not one of Ms. Woeburne's favorite things to do.

Beckett had left her standing there; should she stay put, fall back, or (not likely) follow him? Not knowing what to do, the Ventrue grew tired of loitering and returned to her hotel. But Ms. Woeburne remained restless. She stood in the shower for a while, twisting the temperature until it goosepimpled her body, then re-dressed, feeling cleanly, tight, and well enough to work in the executive lounge. A passing custodian happily opened it for a curt line of Dominate. So it happened that S.W., laptop under one arm, plunked down in a comfortable armchair and fretted. She'd known this snot-nosed lobby, with its imperial crosshatching and orange cream chairs, was a better idea than wandering about with neither hide-nor-hair of destination. Lucky they both hadn't been murdered. The Foreman wiped away a damp, sullen fork of mousy hair and pinned it behind one leg of her glasses.

They'll tell you this is luxury. They'll say in sweet, laborious tones that "free time" is a commodity, something to relish—and Ms. Woeburne supposed she'd bought into that spiel. Still did, all evidence to the contrary. In the bygone days of Hendon, feeling obsolete even then, she'd spend her leisure at practical stuff. She'd be at shooting ranges, or making courtesy calls, or catching up on reading, and, well—to be honest, that exhausted the list. She didn't enjoy enough of that free time state to think up more colorful options.

There were no books in here worth reading. There wasn't anyone to call. She supposed, with some weariness and some disappointment, it is times like these that having friends might be a useful diversion. The Ventrue thumped the arm of the chair and kept fingering disobedient tendrils behind each ear; her hair was too long; it curled at the shoulders; she should really see about cutting it.

Handsome but not attractive; comely but not charming; pleasing but not pretty; well-shaped but not winsome. Surely Mr. LaCroix would not keep his corporal alive, you know, had her foibles overshadowed her successes. Besides, once his sarcophagus entanglement was over, Ms. Woeburne assumed Sebastian would be sending her back to London. ' _Provided Roderick manages to keep the property standing until I return.'_

She pulled out her cell, dialed without overthinking, and waited for an answer.

" _This is the LaCroix Residency, Hendon Estates. How may I—"_

"Roderick," cut him off. Roderick Dunn: somber red hair slicks over butler collars, blandness, and though the officer could not tell you his hometown or eye color, these things stuck fast like scotch tape. He was the safest person she knew. Shoe heel tapping imperial carpet, our soldier was moderately pleased he had not said a dumb _hello_. "This is Ms. Woeburne. I am calling to check-in."

Silence as Dunn flipped through a dozen possible reasons the Prince's warden might be ringing home. He could not imagine why she would want to call.

_"I… I see, Ms. Woeburne. We are fine here. Did Mr. LaCroix want the house messages? Give me a moment; I'll go knock on Shauna's—"_

"No," she lanced in—and it was only at this moment Ms. Woeburne realized how unprecedented this was, how strange it must've seemed to a boy she'd lectured then screened, how strangled her voice sounded. The Foreman shifted in her seat. She watched someone's light huff out in a high-rise across the street. She glimpsed the vague shapes of two people embracing one apartment below and tried not to notice, looked quickly away. _I won't care if I'm dead_ does not apply like you'd hope. It's still an odd dance, a negotiation of modesty and old embarrassments. Hendon's bailiff held the receiver to one ear while her free hand scratched her clavicle; it was chilly; it was a precipice of bone. "No, no. Leave Shauna alone. This is only a look-over. I wanted to make sure everything was going all right."

" _Well… yes. Yes, Ms. Woeburne,"_ he said—called her _Ms.—_ because it's what she called herself. It seemed many years ago they had coldly parted ways at that blackstone doorstep. They'd stood on the marbled front stairs where she'd picked up her briefcase and flicked open her umbrella, then left in a middle-night rain. But it was not so long since she'd said _yes, well, goodbye_. Had she, too, sounded just like this in those early days, when Sebastian would phone for directives and quarterly reports? Does she still? _"Everything's running as usual. Everything's… fine."_

"Oh. That's encouraging. Excellent. Fine."

It is never _good_ with Ventrue; it is always _fine_.

One more light winked out through that wall of dark glass across the street. The silhouette couple had shut their windows. His terseness struck her bizarrely. _"Is there anything else I can do for you?"_

"No. That's—that's adequate. Thank you," she capped—authoritative, sharp, with purpose that did not precisely exist. "Good night."

There was nothing else Ms. Woeburne could think of to say. They hung up.

The Foreman waited a few with her telephone in her hand.

There was really no reason to worry about Roderick, she supposed. Everything seemed under control, wound tightly, functional as a fresh bedspring. Yet she did worry. The revelation that Hendon hadn't struggled without her left Ms. Woeburne feeling odd. Uncomfortable emotions, these: nonplussed, caught off-guard, more than a little unneeded. She shouldn't have yelled at him like that, in that e-mail. She hadn't been thinking with her head. Everything in LA had still been too fresh.

She blinked it off. She sat.

She hoped Beckett was all right.

And she kept on like that, worrying over just about everything, until it became clear he was.

"Beckett, is that you? Where are you? Are you all right?" stampeded into the receiver before he could get a hi-there in.

" _Yes, none of your business, and yes,"_ the Gangrel answered. He sounded a bit weary, but not injured, and not too terribly fazed. She breathed out relief that did not linger long. _"I thought you might appreciate a stitch of closure on tonight. First, tell me: are you at your hotel? And you can forgo zinging back the 'none of your business.' Tempting as it is. I've got some news to pass along."_

"I am," the corporal aye-d. Her mouth chirped around a smile. That Ms. Woeburne wouldn't have tossed a smart remark in Beckett's face didn't mean she hadn't thought one.

" _That's good. You'll probably want to stay inside for a bit. Ideally away from windows."_

And the corporal was up, laptop sagging under one arm, a full lounge-length from the glass, so much for that stitch of a smile.

Maybe he heard her scramble. Beckett went on. _"I hope I didn't scare you. But scared or not, you should know a few things. To begin with: The gunman we crossed this evening, talented as he wasn't, hadn't been expecting me."_

A fist in her throat. " _What_?"

 _"That was my reaction, too."_ His tweaked brow, an inside joke. A heartbeat in the gorge of a neck, a cold foreburn of sweat. _"Goes to show me for guessing, I suppose. Granted, that came off a bit strong. They're not really after your head. Your head's just a bit in the way. The assassination, poorly-executed as it was… hmph! 'Executed.' But I digress: Whatever it was has little to do with you or me, in fact, and neither of our heads. Yours would have only been a means to an end. From what I've turned up, the shooter was under instructions to close his grubby paws around those CDs you passed along when we first met. Do you remember?"_

"Of course I remember," she shot back with more acid than she meant. The veins in the heels of her palms were pounding. Ms. Woeburne was already out of the public room and heading swiftly for her quarters; she dodged a laundry cart; the washer said _sorry_. The Ventrue did not care to hear. A lot of bloody good "means to an end" does. She seriously doubted Beckett left a note kindly explaining S. Woeburne no longer possessed that intel.

And do you know, a thing like this is bound to make smart public officers tense. She thumbed the keycard in her pocket. She turned a corner and stumbled, boot toe stinging, over a hump in the rug.

" _Your perpetrators are Sabbat,"_ Beckett said, _"and they apparently weren't aware of my involvement in this sarcophagus business. Strange for them to be so interested in Assyrian burial art as to make an attempt on a politician, though. I wonder if someone confused them. As if that's difficult."_ _A_ _tsk_ _._ _"You'd be more concerned, I'd think, with the possibility that someone has deliberately confused them. Could an enemy have baited the wolves, young one? I imagine you have your fair share."_

Ms. Woeburne breathed out her nose, stomped the carpet flat, and ran down the black list of those who might profit from a dead Prince's Childe.

Did the local Kuei-jin have any reason to kill her?

' _I don't even know if they're aware I exist.'_

Did Therese Voerman have any reason to kill her?

' _She's likely to be angry with me, when-and-if Jeanette mentions our meeting. But it couldn't be that. Couldn't be her. She has Princehood aspirations. She is much too afraid of Sebastian.'_

Did Nines Rodriguez have any reason to kill her?

' _No. Well, yes. But it's not relevant.'_

What about Isaac Abrams?

' _Baron Hollywood would just send his hound in that case, wouldn't he? Jive.'_

…Lily?

' _As if. Even she isn't stupid enough to tumble into bed with the Sabbat.'_

Perhaps this was a coup, then, from a colleague—some sharp-tack badge like Duncan Leslie, Thomas Genovese, Maribeth Gutierrez? _Maribeth_. It was common knowledge that woman's had her ambitioning eye on the position of Seneschal for years, and she didn't like Ms. Woeburne. That much was obvious. That much was known.

' _It's my best prospect so far, but… no, how could that be?'_

None of these suspects had been told of the sarcophagus dig – not to her knowledge, which tends to be incomplete, but is rarely wrong. Provided Ms. Woeburne's facts were accurate and up-to-date (they were always accurate and up-to-date), only a handful of company IDs could access that information; these included Giovanni research teams, one or two representatives, and Mr. LaCroix himself.

Ms. Woeburne wouldn't even sniff the possibility that he'd been responsible for this.

It was too large to think about. Too ghastly, too gristly a scenario to let in; thoughts that like are weevils, cannibalistic, more dangerous to a loyalist than the actual betrayals. Too impossible. She expunged it before a what-if fear could knock down her spine.

And the suggestion was impractical, besides. Beckett had been very clear: their assailants wanted two precious company-stamped CDs. It wasn't a hit; it was a theft. Even Maribeth wouldn't steal her own work.

"I don't think so," Ms. Woeburne told him. It felt like a sturdy _think so_. Yet she had gnawed her bottom lip into raw, stinging submission by the last turn of the foyer, and the lock of her bedroom door.

" _It's just speculation on my behalf."_ He shrugged. _"You would know best."_

"As difficult as it is for me: I try to never assume that." It was a wry thing to say, dryer than this grimace that hacksawed across her face. Beckett chuckled approval. Her self-depreciation had amused him; how fortunate that self-depreciation is an ancilla's forte.

" _You just might live, then."_

"I'm considering it." Bolted inside, chain-locked, Ms. Woeburne bounced heavily onto her mattress. Throw pillows tumbled off and went abandoned on the shag rug. They were followed by riding boots—those colonial, horse-kicking, people-squashing heels. "Answer something for me. How did you come to find out about all of this? Have you got one?"

" _I have their hard drive."_

"I see."

" _Something else you'll find interesting. Seems your enemies have other ventures keeping them busy tonight—too busy to hire actual sharpshooters, obviously. But I'm being snide."_ She could hear two decisive mouse-clicks beneath his sigh. _"Right now, I'm ruffling through a Ductus's e-mail—a dismal task, as you'd imagine—and I'm turning up communications between this pack and an address in Compton. That's infringing on your territory, if I'm not mistaken. For being, by and large, savages, they have quite a network, don't they?"_

"Compton. Yes. What does it say? Read me the names," she wanted, because when the havoc in question breaches into a government, it's a security problem; it's administration; it is her realm; this is business, and if she can do nothing else, God knows Ms. Woeburne can do that. "Does this regard the artifact? Does it pertain to me."

" _It regards infrastructure. Club Chicago involved themselves in the fray shortly after your arrival, which appears to be an order from LA's Archbishop. In addition to the data you were carrying, he or she was also interested in some sort of West Coast arrangement. Seems that your neighborhood pack—in so many charming misspellings—is coordinating a series of riots in the city,"_ Beckett said, no care for political correctness, brief about the notion. Ms. Woeburne was halfway into bed and could not settle down. Her legs, calves twitching, crossed atop the covers, rumpling all this pastel yellow. Ugly, garish quilt, and it scratched like ants, but now really wasn't the time. She listened and groped for a pen. A bedside notepad; the ink was gummy, dull, unsharp blue. It wasn't the time, at all. _"This normally wouldn't catch my attention, but I thought it might grab yours. The 'idea' is to take advantage of your ceasefire by lighting a few bombs and letting the Anarch Party shoulder most of the blame. It's unusual for a cult of attention-seekers to frame someone, but they've got bones to pick. Something about a raid, a warehouse, and—let me just read it: 'siccing the Fathers' puppets, each at the other's throat.' That's put 'sicking' with a 'k,' by the way. At the very least, they could proofread their proselytizing."_

Another spurt of demands: "Excuse me—w _hat?_ For what reason?" The conspiracy hemisphere of her brain was whirling. Woeburne's brow dented; her headache, once dreary, turned vicious.

" _You're asking me? I don't even know my Primogen's name."_

"I'm sorry. But I don't understand. It's not as if the bombs surprise me. The in-fighting is old news," said a surprisingly schooled, cool-headed voice that sounded a lot like her own. Sickness as spelled with a _k_ was tangling pedigree guts into ghoulish indigestion. The Ventrue cleared her throat to keep it calm. "I mean, on one hand: why not. Sabbat aren't shy about making enemies. LA's packs have no love for our Anarchs, but—"

The scowl slanted. It's a heavy-duty expression, Ms. Woeburne's discontentment—a refinery, metal-studded, steel chimneys pouring steam. "I'll need more information before I can comment on this," was all she could really commit to. Her pitch was prickly and her body felt like unraveling string. Anxious digits plucked at the tasteless covers. She exhaled. "Beckett, could you forward these messages to me, please?"

" _Naturally, young one. I've got it all laid out for you. As I said, politics don't really concern me. But I felt your ears might be pricked by this tour de force."_ A minute's pause. _"And done. I hope it's of use. You can take full credit for the discovery, by the way. Maybe Prince LaCroix will give you a promotion."_

"Oh, I seriously doubt that." The grin wrenched along Ms. Woeburne's teeth was bittersweet and sore. "But thank you."

" _Not at all. Frankly, I don't care what you choose to do with it."_ He was touch indignant. _"We wouldn't want some Nosferatu busybody whispering that Beckett was helping the Camarilla, would we? What would they think? What would people say?"_

"They won't find out from me," she promised, but she was too worn, you know—too thirsty, too nervous, too weighted-down—to manage being friendly. Ms. Woeburne massaged her scalp, head lagging forward, neck stinging, full of heaviness. The corridors of her brain ached. "All the same, this is a very big favor, Beckett. You have my gratitude. Not company gratitude—mine. Whatever little that amounts to, you have it. Is there anything I can do for you before I leave?"

" _If there was, I think I would be in very dire straits. No offense."_ He didn't leave her enough air time for 'none taken.' _"But you really oughtn't leave just yet. The Free-State can sink or swim as far as I am concerned, but I'm curious about other elements. Specifically, I'd like to find out why two packs on separate sides of the continent believe your Prince's pet project is worth so much hassle. While you'll certainly need to exercise caution—they've made it no secret that killing you isn't out of the question—why not extend your stay? A few weeks. It would be beneficial for you, I imagine… being nearby when I puzzle this out."_

"I – well. I don't know. That's just it; I don't know where I'll be," the Foreman stuttered, caught unprepared. You know Ms. Woeburne, and you know how little she appreciates this—being less than ready, getting tripped. "I'm not sure. Maybe. I'll have to speak with the Prince before promising something long-term. Though he'll likely recall me if I send along these documents. When I do." Small teeth chomped a stupid tongue, dreadful Freudian slip. "Perhaps I can arrange for a leave of—"

 _"If the both of you withdraw, I might begin to think you're not serious about archeology,"_ Beckett pouted. She sensed he was absolutely serious.

Ms. Woeburne is still fairly young, as Ventrue come-and-go, but not so woefully young as to mistake a barefaced ultimatum for whining. "I understand," she said. Her two hands were commendably still. "I'll be in touch."

With that sorted, the Ventrue politely bid him goodnight and hung up.

It was two o'clock in the morning. Outside, Drake's hallways were soft, shuffling with rabbitlike noises—housekeepers behind squeaky pushcarts, sugar cups and spoons on silver trays. Inside, the air conditioning kept Ms. Woeburne ten degrees below comfortable. Her socked feet, crossed upon the mattress, were cold. She peeled the starchy garments off and flung them across the room, sliding beneath a corner of sheet. Unruly bangs spidered her forehead. The Foreman surrendered; she couldn't care about posture; and she tilted her pounding skull back until it thumped against indifferent, lumpy wallpaper, a checkered old-fashioned gold. One short, stressed breath pushed through one short nose. Sleep sounded spectacular. Unattainable things usually do.

What to do about this white elephant?

She was safe enough for the day, and her pillows were clean, but Ms. Woeburne knows safety and comfort are transitory. There's the thing about Sabbat, you see—and this does not mean they aren't frightening, because they are. But they are too disorganized, too passionate to threaten one's existence the same way a Ventrue corporal can. Ventrue do not scatter when modus operandi goes amuck. Ventrue do not spell _sic_ with a _k_.

Then again, a Ventrue marksman would not have missed.

Fortunately for Ms. Woeburne, the Sabbat don't recruit many Ventrue these nights. A gaggle of meatheaded Gangrel interrupted by the occasional Lasombra reject she can handle. Ignorant Caitiff she can handle. The thought of whipping around a dark alley and into a Tzimisce was less appealing, but it had never happened to her before, and there was no particular reason to believe it ever would. That's jumping to conclusions. That's called borrowing a jack.

She had to tell Mr. LaCroix. Had to, must, certainly. But the Foreman also had to realize Chicago was an assignment she'd complete alone if there was any hope of salvaging her company reputation. Cowering home unfinished would be a knock-kneed sign of inadequacy, a flag for an officer not worth the effort, who ought to be dismissed. And too bad for the company, and for Ms. Woeburne's reputation in it, because there was no sure way to deliver the information without booking her departure flight. Sebastian was sure to rein her in; he was bound to. Whether the reason was rooted in affection or pragmatics did not matter; not greatly; not, you know, so to speak.

What _does_ matter is preserving a shred of herself. What does matter is not being dismissed, deregulated, _let-go_ to some pathetic station where her stumbles would never be seen by him, or any of them, ever again. She could not risk another disappointment. Not now, not presently, not for a good long time. She would not be written off as a mistake. Service is all a young Ventrue has. She would not return to her Sire with empty hands and unearned pardon. She would not.

So what, then?

This could not go unchecked until it felt convenient to tell him; Sabbat intentions often peter out before fruition, true, but letting them chug along unpoliced jeopardizes the city. She had to tell _someone_. Someone, obviously. Someone, at least, with the strength of position to respond; who could hold down a home fort until Beckett decided she was worth it; who would not consider alerting Mr. LaCroix; and, ideally, one whom she could trust.

' _Three out of four. It's not too bad,'_ the Foreman settled, hefted the telephone back off her thigh, and left a cryptic message for the Anarch Party.

"Woeburne. Call me immediately," she said, that's all.

Then she closed the phone, slid it aside, and brainlessly watched fifty-five minutes of _Fox News_ on a cramped TV.

Fifty-sixth minute:

" _You know, I think I'm pretty used to Camarilla fuckery by now, but I've got to hand it to you. This is a little suspicious, Woeburne,"_ the Baron told her, and as he did, sounded much less intrigued than the Camarilla hoped. _"So that said, I hope you thought about it, and I hope you realize: You got one fuck-up left before I'm done. Five minutes. What the hell do you want?"_

"At least you answered the telephone," she figured.

" _Four and a half."_

"I've got the message. And I'm about to tell you the problem. But do me a favor." Her stare was tourmaline and bored flatly through a ridiculous anchorman on the television screen. She didn't want to picture how Rodriguez must've been folding his arms. It was a wearisome image, one Ms. Woeburne did not enjoy thinking about. "Don't pick a fight with me, will you? There's a good deal I have to get through, and this time, you will want me to be clear."

The Ventrue listened. She had to be very sure all her loops were closed.

_"And I wasn't fucking around. Again: what do you want?"_

She must've sounded just like it that day in the park. _What do you want? There has to be something. What could you possibly get from me?_ It was an irony that made Ms. Woeburne press into her forehead with her thumbs.

She related events quickly and dispassionately. The urgency overwrote the other stuff—the sour, bitter, unsettled score; the repressed hatred, both physical and historical—but though a Foreman's tones are tailored, her worries are authentic, something to believe. Rodriguez did not interrupt her. She did not ask for opinions this time. Only an idiot would've dial-toned now.

" _Don't get me wrong,"_ the Baron said, voice conveying his squint-eyed glare. _"Because I don't suspect you're in a place to concoct bullshit of this magnitude. But let me in on something. Where is my guarantee? What reassurance do I have that this isn't another armistice treatment? I don't give a fuck whether you knew it going in or not. You worked us over last time. You promised pacifism and you brought a firefight. You put me in a place I stood to get killed."_

"Correction: Leopold did. I did not. They have nothing to do with me or with us; you know that. You know it perfectly well. And you also know what else I did there," she reminded him; it was a stiff, brave, humbling thing to say.

There was another pause. In her cluttered room, on her obtuse television, a demeaning celebrity exposé. Ash Rivers hovered dismissively before a two-penny journalist, grudgingly handsome; she watched him shrug, mum ling a handful of excuses to send made-up gossip girls clacking in the opposite direction. Count on Toreador to get a postmortem adrenaline rush from toeing Masquerade violation on cable network. Ms. Woeburne's jaw clenched.

"I'll send along my sources once we're done here," she added when he did not argue, and did not say no. "Look them over for yourself and make a decision. But I didn't think you'd listen without handling this directly. The Sabbat are a nuisance—to you, to us, to everyone. You can choose not to believe me and ignore my warning, I suppose, but understand that the consequences of doing so are yours."

" _How did you find out about this?"_

"They tried to shoot me a few hours ago."

Do you know, it's just not unique enough, being shot at, to gain her some credibility with an Anarch. That commonplace danger is not going to win you any pity in this world. But Woeburne could hear him considering, defenses at firing range, a brooding decision on the other side of the line.

" _Hmn."_

"Do you want the documents?"

" _Uh-uh."_

"I don't speak Neanderthal. Yes or no."

" _I don't want anything from your office or your number until I get an answer to this question. Why are we talking,"_ the Baron demanded. Camarilla bargains never come without spiderweb strings. That he had not immediately slammed down the phone indicated a willingness, though; it opened a bridge to more questions, but it was a thin one, built of wicker sticks. It is not a painless peace between the Ventrue and the Brujah. She was torn between the cinder of a laissez-faire sneer and those same teeth lit in their own fear, terrible injury, swallowing the black stuff behind them, trying not to die. No, nothing painless. _"What's in it for you? I understand what you're offering didn't come easy. And I appreciate the shit you obviously slogged through to get it. But you have to appreciate that no matter how real your concerns might be—and I got no real reason to think they're real—at the end of the day, you're a badge. I can't get over that. If you expect me to have time for you, Cam, you're going to have to start being honest with me on more terms than yours."_

Careful. _Careful_.

"You are beginning to frustrate me. But this is important, so I am going to explain to you, again, the stakes. You want honesty. How much more of that do you think I have, exactly? I am being transparent. I've tried to be forthcoming. The Sabbat are mobilizing in a way that threatens your people. It threatens mine, too. Me, too. I can't turn a cheek on it because I don't like you. Inaction, at least about this, is a dereliction of duty, and a failure to—"

He barked a mean laugh. _"How long did that take you, Woeburne? Just professional curiosity. Did you practice. Do you pull that shit out of the goddamn air?"_

"I haven't given any of it to Prince LaCroix." Crisp; punctuated; chilly in a pointed, spurred heel sense, in the same way Novembers are. Those are words you could probably use for S. Woeburne's voice. "Extenuating circumstances. The information goes to you. As a first-responder. Choose what to do with it. I am relieving myself of the responsibility."

" _What circumstances."_

"That's my business. You have what you have. Either act on it or do not."

Not much else could be said. She considered hanging up, because it felt like it would've been right and dramatic, but there are many sorts of conversations where dramatic timing does not serve you well.

 _"All right, snake,"_ Nines cautioned. It was the truest insult he had, yet there was faint optimism, something like teasing, and Ms. Woeburne never supposed she'd be anything but infuriated to be somebody's fun. _"Maybe you ain't all tooth."_

Her joke was brittle. "I used to vote Labour."

The Anarch's scoff seemed unkind.

 _"Send proof,"_ Rodriguez said. _"We'll look into it."_

"Oh, thank god. Finally. Fine. Thank—"

He hung up.


	62. Blunder

**blun-dered, blun-der-ing, blun-ders:** ****  
**1.** _To move clumsily or blindly._   
**2.** _To make a usually serious mistake._

* * *

 

 

Lily scratched the paint off her face, dropped the brush into its can, and sat back.

By her own standards, she was doing pretty OK.

Knox's apartment had to get clean. It was bound to happen. You can live in dust for a while, sure, but eventually, a room reaches the tipping point where somebody better pour water on it fast or give the whole thing up. They weren't there quite yet, but had crept way too close for her comfort. The place needed to be taken apart, scoured, rinsed off, and put back together—and, since she wasn't doing much of anything else, Lily was the one to do it. And today was the day.

She'd spent the last few hours sorting and binding her housemate's newspaper collections, stacking sloppy towers from floor-to-ceiling. She'd popped a hundred cobwebs. And, somehow, she'd pushed Knox's massive oak bookcase outside his filthy room to paint over the cracks. Five years of junk—five years of scavenging, storing, cramming—all culminating into the same massive fire hazard. There was a small disaster sitting in the hall. It had become, for the time being, an obstacle course of crumbling parchment, mildew, and wide-elbowed furniture with cumbersome frames. Rotting wood pulp thickened the air and permeated everything. But, provided nothing exploded, Lily wasn't worried. It's not like she was rinsing the apartment in gasoline. It's not like she was trying to burn the place up.

"Where the hell are you?" she wondered, uselessly, raking both palms across her oldest blue jeans, trying to get them clean.

One week ago, Lily warned Knox her dismal spare room was slated for the chopping block. It was going to be—and these are her words—fixed it. It was getting scraped, kicked, hammered, and bleached into a legitimate living space. He'd waved it off with a distracted _"oh, sure, awesome."_ And that was the extent of his involvement. Once upon a time, the ghoul promised to lend a hand somewhere in all this disinfecting, dusting, and stuccoing; but, lo and behold, he'd had been MIA the entire evening, with no signs of turning up now. _'Typical.'_

Anyway, it was probably better to have free reign over the place for a while. Knox tended to launch into pantomiming in a way that threatened the décor.

Lily pulled off her bandana. It took a few strands with it, and she twisted the green, splattered cloth around fingers and thumb, looking at the fine orange cords where they broke. They'd been itching the crap out of her ears—which, all right, curled out just the tiniest bit. It was useless, anyway, trying to protect her head. From mites and mold. Maybe tomorrow she'd head down to ValueMart and buy a couple cheap rugs to cover the chips in their hardwood. Garnet or a nice baby-blue would brighten that bedroom, offset the boring cream Lily picked for her walls. Yeah, something reddish sounded nice. Maroon carpet, matching drapes, and a few patterned lampshades to make these walls feel lived-in. Feel like something better, at least, than the mildewed storage closet it was before. She was going to buy a bed frame. She was done sleeping on pallets, with camping on the floor.

Lily cracked her knuckles and got off the ground.

The last step would be putting the disaster zone back together, and thinking of that nice, milky gloss of new paint, she'd do a good soaping beforehand. Dirt has a way of spreading its arms throughout a clean place. Dirt tries to find its way in.

She took a basement trip to secure a water bucket, a box of detergent, and a scattering of crisp yellow sponges. They sloshed at her kneecaps all the way back up. When, legs soaked, she finally kicked the heavy door shut and settled down to work again, Knox was still nowhere to be seen.

It wasn't unusual for the guy to skitter off and disappear into Los Angeles for a few days; "Doing stuff for my master" was his general excuse. Lily didn't mind, just so long as he told her beforehand. _'He better at least call in the next hour. Otherwise I'm locking up.'_

Lily looked at the rag in her hand. It sopped and freckled the floor. A sigh hit her then, powdery gray with the dust in her lungs. Would there ever be a time she wasn't left taking care of other peoples' stuff?

There had maybe once been some of her own. Lily had some things that were her own, she was positive; she had to. She loved cherry chapstick. She hated doing the dishes. She liked music while she worked: tooth-rot, sugary hits; boy-bands, girl-power, embarrassing ones. She'd wear headphones and whisper lyrics under her breath in the fearful cold echo of Empire Arms, not wanting to jump at every set of stern, impartial footsteps. Now there was no reason to care if anyone overhead her. She turned on the radio and was loud.

Wet sleeves, slippery floorboard, tissue stuffed in the grooves of a file cabinet to keep its insides dry. Each drawer had to be yanked out. Lily peeled handfuls of envelopes and set them somewhere safe.

She was supposed to keep to the living room and the latrine. That was the understanding she'd reached with Knox. The guestroom was musty; the bathroom was full of collapsing paper and black mold on turquoise tile. But Lily confessed to getting a bit carried away. Ripping that grody plastic shower curtain off its hooks had been restorative—and having replaced one eyesore, she found it hard to stop. There was a broken lamp that needed replacing in the den and she did it. She sent two mange-eaten welcome mats down the garbage shoot, woodstained cup-circles off the coffee table, and stuffed a knife jab in their kitchen countertop with wax. Slide in a few deodorizers (these were purportedly _Raspberry Mist_ ), and it might even look like a house in here. The colors were tangible; they weren't black, white, passionless gray.

In the back of her mind, she could still see the startle of her blood hit that carpet—two drops, ruined monochrome, catastrophe in red.

One of these days, Lily had to quit thinking about Ms. Woeburne. The envy became resentment, and the resentment became guilt: a slow, hardening simmer just beneath her ribs. She wasn't sure if it would ever rust into regret or not. She wasn't sure if this rake teeth feeling came from wronging a woman who might've been her, or if it was merely a less-painful substitute for heartbreak, for the picture of E's face beneath all that broken coffee table glass. Would she see him again? Scarier: would he want to see her?

Blood on carpet, tears on the kitchen wax. Lily shoved the memory outside herself. She drove her grubby sponge.

And she hadn't meant to find it.

She hadn't. Really hadn't. She really hadn't meant this, Lily would swear it, as if swearing would ever be enough. The fat folders and rubber-banded files and stacks of correspondence weren't labeled coherently enough to navigate, anyway; you couldn't search them. But nobody anticipates an accident. She couldn't have anticipated that her left sneaker toe would catch an uneven edge of floorboard. She hadn't counted on tossing an armful of manila, paperclips careening midair, across cheap maple. As a matter of fact, the fledgling panicked—not because of what might be lying face-open at her feet—but because she may have just destroyed Knox's portfolio. There was a plunge, the reckless slant of her hands as they bunched loose sheaves together. Bad luck, that's all. Not fortune—just luck. It spilled a bundle onto Lily's lap.

And it was there. It happened. That folder came to her, and he'd dog-eared everything inside of it.

He had everything.

He had it printed out and sorted by date: e-mails, phone bills, past addresses, school names, jobs held, phone calls, her credit card history _._ Salaries and tax returns. Facebook photos, the number above her mailbox, her college ID. Every message she'd ever sent to Ms. Woeburne marked and underlined in scratchy green ink.

Lily thought she would throw up. But her insides went too cold for that. Stomach pains—her arm wrapped across her abdomen, body thumping heavily into a seated position, head bowing woozily between both knees. She didn't think vampires fainted. But, while papers shuffled limply beneath, before, and around her, and the shock drowned out her tinny music, it felt like something internal was coming unhinged. There was a flowering empty space inside, unrolling like a fern. The reality of it was crushing. She filled up her chest and there was that old nothing-burn.

It shouldn't have made Lily bat an eyelash—not after everyone else.

Not after Rolf, who abandoned what he made because it was imperfect. Or after Ms. Woeburne and the Camarilla, who told you only what they thought you needed to know—and if you knew too much, took off your head, as cool and easily as they did everything. Or after Nines and the Anarch Movement, who'd tell you anything you wanted and sound good doing it, but would chuck you the instant their informant could no longer inform. Something in the pettiness of the thing. Knox played stupid. He had blinked, looked hopeless, and acted that lie, allowing Lily to believe she was an enigma, a person with some mystery to keep. But truth was right on her lap—just sitting, in reach, as though she'd never look for it, never happen to suspect, or question, or stumble. They were dated up to last week.

Lily stood up. She left the sad mound where it fell; dumbstruck fingers wouldn't cooperate. She couldn't feel her hands. The knuckles were like knobs on a tree trunk, like bolts in open hinges. Her knees felt weak. Her mouth had a strange synthetic flavor, esophagus tight, tongue rubbery, a water balloon, a little plastic held carefully between cold gums. Wedging past the colossal bookshelf, she went into Knox's bedroom and slid down the flaking teal wall opposite his unmade bed.

Lily would've left if she had anywhere to go, if she'd saved up enough money for a shitty hotel. The cash in her wallet would get her maybe a week or two. She didn't even own any luggage. Sinus pressure throbbed from her brain down her pipes. She struck the back of her skull into the plaster and tried not to implode. She felt very tired, really. She could have lay down. She might have gone to sleep.

This is it, she said. This is as low as I go.

That's another thing about lies, Lily guesses: you don't always need to tell them. Sometimes they just exist, already inside of you, firing without any permission at all. She suddenly could not say how much of herself was real. E had been right. Not about everything, and not about who Lily was, and is, but about this: these animals are not people. Their world doesn't allow it. Maybe she ought to give up that want for something human, something _more_ , and let the weight fall. There is always that smell of night in LA, the black texture of air, a color with a capital-B; it says _what if_. What if there isn't anything more. What if the honesty of you being small is the best companion you'll have, a companion that comes in the hardness of truth: No matter how you behave, you will get stuck, and you will dissipate, because you're just a mouthful to quicker animals, someone to end up _here_. This is how it goes for all small fish who flash in and out of the coral under the shadows of sharks.

She ran through the here-and-now.

Lily didn't want to force Knox into a position where he had no viable option but to kill her. And she knew he kept a handgun in the nightstand. He didn't want her to know that, obviously, but there'd been ammo cases on his closet shelves, and on her second week here, she hunted down the pistol. There was no lock; Knox, a perpetual bumbler, must've been afraid of losing the key.

The prospect of a bullet entering her body in hours was unreal. Or maybe, after everything, it was too real; Lily opened that creaky drawer and removed its tenant. The gun was heavier than she expected. But it fit in her hand, metal clean and dry, reminding the woman of another borrowed weapon, one that could have been hers. She wondered if Knox had ever fired it. Had he killed anyone? The thought was unpalatable. But why not. Lily tried to imagine him aiming and prematurely halting someone's life. How much force would it take? How much force to get a Caitiff to the ground, on a sidewalk, under a shoe; Ms. Woeburne's polished heel-toe on the other side of a steak knife on the white kitchen tile; E on the bathroom floor with the shape of her teeth in his neck, red spatter on the toilet seat, what did you do; Nines Rodriguez standing in a downtown alley, stepping on a dead man's chest, looked at him, fired, no drama, arm barely moving with the casual bounce of the gun; cartridge inside her throat; one sound: _bangbang_ ; a mechanical, dispassionate thing _; listen,_ _she told Rolf_ _, I'm really bad at this, but I'm Lily, can I buy you a drink?_ ; unwarm blood across the hardwood she'd buffed only minutes ago.

The pistol was loaded. She laid it gently on a plank beside her, machine at rest.

Maybe she ought to throw it out the window. _Don't do that_ ; there's no telling if he's got another stashed somewhere; you better be smarter; you better not let this happen to you again. There was jelly in her diaphragm, a wound that lost its scab, but Lily could think clearly. It was better to keep the handgun. If it came to that.

Lily's elbows were moving. She made them relax. She attempted to calm herself; she was, for all this, still a vampire. A bottom-feeder, maybe, a snapper in deep water, but still a vampire. She was not defenseless. She wasn't about to flop down and lose another fin to a smaller fish.

' _What are you doing; what am I doing?'_ She has felt this question inside her before.

Lily stared at the handgun and swallowed _._ She couldn't kill Knox. She'd never killed anyone before; she wasn't about to start on someone who had been her friend. Because he had been hers, she figured, even if she hadn't been his. He was too familiar: nervous ticks, humming, fidgeting fingers and squeaking tennis shoe toes.

Time was going funny. It might've been an hour. It might've been fifteen minutes. It might not have made any difference at all. She heard him walk in. Chain locks wiggled, sounding like a barn, making Lily expect her mother might start cussing under her breath, like she did when the stable door wouldn't shut all the way. The deadbolt fired. She listened as he took stock of his place, of the house midway taken apart; he said _ah shit_ , scratched at his scraggly hair. Knox moved in lunges. The vampire counted his footsteps—across the old, cheap floor, worrying things, briefly searching for her. She pushed out the last of the air from her throat. She reached for the pistol.

The hinges creaked. She waited. Their sound was horrible and let in a thin glow of color from outside.

Knox came in and saw a loaded gun.

_What the_ was all he got out before Lily moved her body and hefted the weapon at him. Reflex action, a flurry of adrenaline, chemicals that didn't die. The ghoul took cover behind his insubstantial bedroom door. A bullet would've crunched through.

"What the fuck is this?" she screamed, holding the pistol with no concrete concept of how prepared she was to use it. Lily found papers fisted in her hand and hurled them. They never made it—they lost one another mid-air, a crippled, fluttering burst. He didn't need to see, anyway. She could have killed him with confidence then.

She wanted to ask _why_ —she wanted an explanation at gunpoint—but there wasn't really an answer that could fix it. Feeling ruined, Lily threw all her questions and her care at arm's-length, and she dug in.

"You son-of-a-bitch," she shouted, not a shriek, but one sure peal of sound. Cortisol turned those trembling elbows to wire, locking the tendons, knowing there was no space to withdraw. She wasn't going to let him speak. "I knew you were spying on her but how could you—how could you—to me? I'm not going to let you do it. I'm not going through this again. Don't," she hollered when his mouth opened.

"Jesus, Lily, Jesus—"

"I said," she swore. "I said shut the fuck up. Shut your fucking mouth. You brought this on us. You did it. You don't get to talk." She could see the unhealthy pink of her hand around the Colt. Its churned up a thick, blushing sweat, the most her body would allow. "This is my life. I don't have a master to protect me; I get stuck with what I can get, and knowing that, you used it. You used it against me. You used every time I came back here, every time you said didn't matter. For _what_? I want to know what. I want to know what you sold from me."

"I can't. I don't know. Lily, I don't, I can't—I can't do this." His voice lost its footing and went weak; his posture was on the verge of a run.

"Try," she said.

"Lily, come on." It was a shaking, soothing favor to ask, and the ghoul skittered at every twitch. He shrank behind the barricade of door, clean boards slippery under his spotless shoes. Knox's face had changed color; it collapsed in on itself, a chalky texture, boyishness bleeding out. It made a paste of large ears and the place where that sharp, birdlike, off-center chin would have been shaking _no_ or nodding _yes_. There was something nasal to how he talked to her, and a grimness, alien to the bright eyes with dark circles. His fear was real, but it was not new. "Calm down. Put the gun down. Just—just—just breathe for a minute, all right? You don't know. It's not that simple. See? It's not simple. I can tell you as much as I can. Don't do this. This is crazy—"

_Crazy_ was the wrong thing to say. "I'm what," she barked, ducts watering, agitating scarlet, but nothing fell. Something went red in her. The lamp on his bedside table shattered when she ripped it from its outlet. He heard but did not really see the smash on the wall.

"Don't shoot," he begged. Knox recoiled, dodging, like the porcelain had been a gunshot; he probably thought it had been.

"I'd have to be. I'd have to be out of my fucking mind to think you people had anything like that—anything like a conscience, or morals, or a soul. This is CRAZY? Are you going to add that to your next report, you piece of shit?" Another crash as a misaligned picture frame tripped its nail and bit the dust.

"Hey, whoa! No, no, no way; you are wrong. That's not how it is. If you're going to do this, at least know what you're doing it for. I never passed that file to Bertram," he swore, but the chattering of his bottom jaw cheapened what it might've changed.

"Fuck you," Lily said. Her shoulders were cold and mean beneath her ears. Her molars smashed together. She felt a pain that came from nowhere and everywhere at once. "Why should I believe anything you say? Your master probably planted you in that shitty bar to pick me up. You thought maybe there was still something to get from me, some way to get at Ms. Woeburne's business. Let me save you some time: there's not. This well is all dried out. Fuck you people. I am so sorry," she spat, "so sorry I met Ms. Woeburne. What were you going to do once Bertram decided I wasn't helping him along—pretend like none of this happened, boot me out on my ass? Why even bother. Just wait till I fell asleep and throw open my fucking blinds!"

"That is total bullshit!" His palms flung forward as if to ward something off. "Look, let's get one thing straight right now. I never knew you worked for Woeburne until that night when you grabbed her file. Bertram didn't even put me on that case until after you moved in here. And what was I supposed to do," he dared her, loud now, almost angry, pupils dilated and stuck on the Cyclops pistol eye. "What the hell was I supposed to tell him? _'No, sorry, not cool?'_ Jesus, man. I can't. I can't do that! This is Bertram, OK? He would've killed me. I would have disappeared. I don't want that. I don't know what I..." But the ghoul's mouth was arid and empty of anything else to want or say. His arms slumped, loose rope, at both sides. "I just know I can't. I'm sorry. I _can't_."

Lily's sympathy couldn't subsist. "Why didn't you tell me?" she wanted to know; that didn't make it answerable or fair. "Now you act like there's some kind of excuse for what you did to me? I'm not a fucking moron. Not anymore. You played me. You were in this from day one. Pop journalist? Get the fuck out!"

Mistaking her expletive for an order, Knox sprang backwards, ducking into the adjacent bathroom. He banged a heel on the toilet and toppled. Fingers twisted into the new shower curtain; he groped to prevent himself from falling, snapping rings on the way down. Now the ghoul was cornered between Lily and a three-by-four window with shatter-proof glass. There was nowhere to go. Hopefully he wouldn't reach into a medicine cabinet and come out with another gun.

"I was going to tell you," Knox blabbered, but couldn't finish; there were too many knots tied up in his throat. Lily growled at him. He pressed into the icy wallpaper, back hunched and yellow-eyed. There was no exit to improvise. He'd have to go under, over, or through her.

"OK, no," Knox admitted, tongue tip sweeping. His nose was running. He sniffed. "That's a lie. There's no way I was going to tell you anything. Shit, man—I knew you'd react like this. But I wasn't trying to hurt you. It was just—it was a coincidence. A coincidence, you know? At least that's how it was to me. Bertram probably knew. He definitely knew." And he folded his arms, holding himself tightly, gripping at the clothing and skin, backbone bristling, one link after the next. His limbs had started to shake; it was hot in this bathroom, humidity and bleach. He looked like a prisoner kicked off a boat, left naked in some tundra, where wolves ate openly and where the earth was too hard for a shovel or a cave. "But I didn't. Not till you started acting so weird. Do you think you had anything he didn't already know, that he couldn't find out? You're kidding yourself. These people don't miss anything. They don't—" He had to stop; he'd forgotten to breathe.

"So you used me like a fucking fact check," she told him.

"Fine, Lily. Whatever. Yes. I did."

They looked at each other. There was a ripple of plastic from the hanging curtain. There was a drip from the faucet head: _tink, tink, tink_.

"But I didn't do it because I thought I could get something. I didn't do it because I thought I'd be paid, or paid off, I don't know. I did it because my master told me to. He's my master. My _master,_ right?" Knox said the word with a respect she had never felt—unwillingness, repugnance, suspended on worship she'd never know without blood-bond. He was panting. He was like somebody's dog. "I had to. I _had to_. I didn't want to. Really, I didn't. Because you're my friend. You're the only one I've got. I just—I just had to do what I had to do, you know? What I had to do."

Lily exhaled. The gun felt more and more like a flyaway reel. Knox stared at her, salivating, breathing through those oversized front teeth.

Envy fizzled out. It was resignation, too. And something else—something familiar but unpleasant, something sweet like saccharine and old cake and horseshoe prints in the snow.

_Pity_.

Lily lowered the handgun—a wilting, hundred-pound slump.

"Oh my god. Fuck," she said. Knox sat in the bathtub and watched her swear.

"What now?"

"I want you to get rid of it. All of it. Burn everything you have on me," she ordered him. They were both still shaking. He climbed out of the tub, slowly, as though moving too fast might spook her in the way it makes tired dogs bite. Knox's hands were death-white; they were insect wings, hovering over the steady descent of her gun.

"Yeah, yeah, OK," he promised. He immediately tried to pacify her, to prove it. Knox reached down for a stray leaflet that had stuck to his sneaker, pulled, and shredded. Lily watched the scraps waft through knobby fingers. Each piece seemed smaller than the last, more insignificant, leaves falling late off a winter tree. It was all so strange. What if she hadn't seen it? What if she hadn't minded all the dustbunnies and never gave a shit about this crappy apartment? What if she never took a Ventrue's money and never took a man at his word?

"Lily?" Knox asked.

She had no more in her to yell. "Yeah. What?"

And that was when he pointed to his stolen weapon where it rested, impotently stiff and still against the dead flesh of her thigh.

"Just, um. For future reference. You have to turn the safety off," he said.

Lily went into her clean white room—and when it was quiet, and when it was light outside, she finally put the gun down, and she cried.


	63. Racerun

Nines Rodriguez knows where the money is, and it isn't this handful of bills.

Baron Los Angeles surveyed the home around him with some skepticism. The uneasiness of his nature is always worsened by this place. Hollywood—it's a place disconcerting in a flirtatious way that does not hold people like him well. Hollywood with its sham bullfights, gold watches, big checks. It's got a huge ego, and it narrowed his eyes in the empty room—a wince, a flinch of silver, considerable hesitance as the Brujah's sides burned from the phosphorus lingering in him. He made his expression unreadable through the dim light. Hollywood is a place that makes him feel the inexplicable need to move on, to get out of wherever he's at—out of this city, off this street, outside of this strange, echoing townhouse in some rich-boy hill, built of pretentious, windowless walls.

There hadn't even been a bouncer guarding the door of Nicky Shih's property. There was just a big, ugly fern in a Moroccan jar. He hadn't called yesterday evening to make an appointment. They hadn't left him a number. He hadn't been escorted to some cashmere smoking lounge with leather sofas and brocade. They hadn't offered. There was no one around to demand his weapons or pat down his coat; he'd buzzed, knocked, and walked right in.

Child, you had better not trust a trap that lets you walk right in.

The house was uncomfortable. Its decorations, orange paper, its tiki-print wall accents and mahogany were all one strutting show. You come right on in, Baron; make yourself at home; don't mind the brand new Sherwin rugs, barely been walked on, hardly been laid out. Sit down, grab a chair. Have some Merlot and some motherfucking tea cake. We'll be the best goddamn friends there ever were. Nines didn't bother taking offense. This shit is just who the Toreador are.

Shih's condo was barren in comparison to Isaac's. It was not a home that looked lived-in. A conference table sat right in the entrance hall, five steps through that bright fucking red front door—nothing on it but a caustic Windex sheen. The ceiling bulbs were bare. The second floor banister shined, arcing into unmoving rooms that weren't visible from where he waited. You couldn't find dust with a wet rag. There was no sound, either, but the neighborhood cars turning outside; no movement, save for the plant fronds caught in cheap fans. It made Nines nervous. He did not sit. He couldn't find any chairs. The Baron stood, and he waited, and he watched for something to happen, feeling irate and dark in a fresh room painted eggyolk yellow on clamshell white.

The politician Rodriguez had come here to speak with was a politician in a peripheral sense; he was an accountant, more like, who managed a few local clients for Abrams; namely, Nicky was Ash Rivers's number-one financial babysitter. It was a safe, high-profile, low-impact job.

The prospect of tapping some holes in the underside of Isaac's moneytank had been on his mind for awhile, but Rodriguez wasn't actually the one to set this all in motion. Too risky. But the fact is: they needed more money. There were progressively fewer worthwhile soldiers in LA, and the chunk of cash from Bernardino, who'd been pushing his boys (unsuccessfully) to sell angeldust out east, wouldn't ride out a week. Add that to the seven-hundred-some in dues K-Al collected monthly from a local ring, some inconsequential fuck named Dennis, who'd earned ghouldom by smashing in the head of a blueblood last winter. Damsel had already finished her drive. It was not going to be enough. He could already tell you it wouldn't hold them over through the year.

Nines had just started to wonder how a man in his position might safely inquire about finding an extra patron when—lo and behold—there was a message blinking on his machine. It was from Nicky Shih, who he'd never met, but who had decent reasons to complain about Baron Hollywood and—more importantly—direct access to one of his favorite moneymakers.

So he showed up, parked two blocks down to avoid surveillance, hopped the community gate and set himself somewhere downstairs. In this vacant townhome, by himself, smelling cleaner on the bare décor and cinder in a bitter cold fireplace.

"Did I keep you waiting?" Shih asked, not really a question, thin voice and charcoal eyes that blinked as he slid through a back door.

Nicky Shih was kind of an odd snake. He'd been a performer in some opera bit prior to his appearance in Los Angeles, but talked and operated more like an agent. Dark pupils would've been more at home in a copperhead's face; black bangs flicked when he shook his head, smugly laden in product; a shaven face did nothing to disguise the sharp, jutting chin. He had CEO teeth inside a negotiator's grin and a pale port wine disrupting one emaciated, sorrel cheek. It was exactly the sort of look that made Nines think _Ventrue_ , but in California, slick shits aren't necessarily bad friends.

Because it was in his character, the Baron's look hardened immediately; because he was genuinely curious in figuring this whole thing out, that hard look wasn't especially menacing. He folded both arms from across the massive dinner table. His coat was lined too obviously with leather and guns. "I can be patient when I've got reason to be. I hope you give me one. You're—"

"In person. And, of course, I know who you are." They did not shake. Shih entered the vestibule, exit latch shutting behind him, a flash of electricity and palm leaves dipping in from outside. There was no air circulation in here. Neither sat down. The Toreador wrestled his jacket onto a closet hanger, disconcertingly bold, irreverent wrinkles in a green striped button-down and too-clean jeans. "Don't worry. You won't leave disappointed. That much I can swear upfront."

"We'll see."

"You didn't want a drink, or anything? Sorry. You think I'd be better at this." Nines's frown must have said no for him. Shih didn't seem to care. "Good," he said. His was a rehearsed kind of informality, confidence that makes your teeth itch. Smooth fucking operator. You could tell he was an asshole from the way his shirtsleeves were rolled. "Straight to the chase. That's how I prefer it. Before we start, though, I have a ground rule: Anything said here is strictly confidential. Doesn't go out of the room. I can't extend that promise outside, obviously. It's just that I hate tap-dancing around what needs to be talked about. So in this house, please, be as frank as you damn well want."

The glitter of Abrams Jewelry always set Baron Rodriguez on edge: claustrophobic corners, too much emerald glass, antique aromas, and their snide fatcat at his expensive desk. But Nines did not like how these spacious new walls made his own voice echo and buzz. "Nice rule. Am I on camera?"

The Toreador shook his head, lifting one palm, somewhere between a cough and a snort. "No, of course not. The whole property is a business front. I take clients here, occasionally, but I'm not stupid enough to live or film where I work."

It's difficult to trust what a Presence clan says, and Nines included his own in that assessment. It was not as though he expected Shih might shoot him. It is not that kind of bad taste in Hollywood. But a squinty, disorienting pain still seared the Baron's side at every odd twist or turn. The bandages were gone and the holes beneath them had healed, leaving a filmy, fatalistic pang in his mouth. He wanted to be careful, more than he usually did.

Especially not after what happened on that pier. The failure in Santa Monica had earned Nines some serious criticism from the councilors in Hollywood, those fuck-faced little prats who'd wonder if shot Anarchs are good neighbors to keep, question if this explosion was somehow his fault. He still wasn't sure what dice Woeburne rolled in all that. Frankly, he resented being squeezed into an arrangement where she took the liberty of speaking to him; he wasn't about to be some Board member's weekend playing piece, hell with Chicago or their Sabbat. But he wasn't going to refuse the information. He wasn't that full of it. He didn't have enough to say no to.

He'd keep Woeburne at a careful distance for awhile, same way you leave spiders to eat smaller pests. You set margins, poke at them a bit, then let them be and watch what happens. It's a tripwire of a trade, but better than the alternative. Fact is that Ventrue make the best eyes when you can stand them long enough to collect the reports. He just had to hit a foul ball her way every now-and-then.

 _This_ could've been a trap, too, Nines supposed, but Isaac was rarely that insecure. Hollywood's reputation couldn't handle preemptive attack in a burb full of artistes. And Baron Downtown imagined his own reputation didn't make him a real desirable target for some lone Toreador suit's blackmail. Just a hunch.

"I'm going to share an observation, if it doesn't offend you. You're in an untenable situation. Sorry for that. But now that it's out: I mean this militarily, sure, but I really mean financially. That's always the problem. Running an army is not cheap work. Or I imagine it isn't, at least; my desk has zilch to do with warfare. But I _do_ appreciate how command can turn from a character trait to a trade commodity. Don't think I don't."

"You're tap-dancing," Rodriguez informed him. "Abrams bankrolls me. Is that where this discussion is headed? Because our arrangement for the State is not a secret. If you're that afraid of offending me, this thing ain't looking to get very far."

The Toreador hadn't been expecting that. He adjusted his collar. He looked about thirty-five. "Don't let me give you the wrong impression. Flattery isn't on my agenda; I just didn't want you to think I was rude."

"I'll worry about what I think. You tell me what you're offering."

Shih gave a deliberating _hmm_. He wasn't taken aback, so to speak, but there was cautious positivity about him, a shaky good sign. "I can see this is going to be a short talk. Not that I've got a problem with that. I'll be as direct as I can with you: What I'm offering, tonight and beyond, is another way to operate. A way that doesn't rely upon the generosity of a Baron whose interests are, let's say, less than patriotic. Unlike my superior—" Here he tapped at his own shoulder thoughtfully, watch jingling, more decoration than tool. "—I have an immediate sense of what danger looks like and stronger ideas about how it should be dealt with. Like most of us in Hollywood—well. With the exception of two very particular siblings—I'm not surrounded by a patron's thugs to protect me. And I realize that war strategies shouldn't be hatched by directors in boardrooms. Holding purse strings doesn't make you a general. And, you know, this argument's been made a hundred times."

Nines Rodriguez's priorities are healthier than capitalism; his methods are in a heavier weight class than the sweaty hunger of the rich to earn _more_. The Free-State is a lurid beast in many ways, but it's too hardheaded to stomach wealth for wealth's sake. You cannot be like the Ventrue or the Toreador in this. You set that petty greed aside. You do not sit on your Swiss bank account and let it grow fat. For warlike people, more important than the payout is surviving until you can spend it. They are not ancient dukes with a dozen generations of diamonds and pearl behind them. They are not Old World heirs who count coins and bide their time. They are witches' children. They have to be faster than all of the other animals who want the carcass of the last giant got left behind.

Nines Rodriguez deserves this city. He remembers the fragility of being loud and being big. He is not about that dog and pony show. He knows what it's really about. And it is not about what you deserve.

Power is shit on its own, and that's what you've got to understand if you want to do what he does someday; power doesn't mean safety, and survival precedes power, and to get any ground to stand on, what you need is more basic. It's about control. It's the simplest organ of power. Nines Rodriguez deserves it because he gets the difference between a desire for power and a need for control.

Isaac gets power. That's all.

The Baron placed both palms on the untouched surface of that table to lean forward. Shih was socially sensitive enough to mimick his body language in a roundabout way. He might've had prior experience in negotiating with Brujah, whom one should never intimidate or try to flatter, or he might've caught onto the way his best-bud diplomacy was making Baron Angeltown bristle. In the new angle, you could see the mean-eyed wink of a handgun tucked beneath Rodriguez's pocket.

"If this is about money," Nines said, "I'll listen. But I need a clear picture about what you expect in return."

"What I expect you to do is whatever you think is best. I'm not trying to buy you out. To be honest, I don't really want contact with you right now, and I'd think you'd understand why. Like I said, I am not in any way my boss. So that means—" And the Toreador was twisting his lizard eye spit of a watch, happy about himself. "—I'll give you full jurisdiction over any investments I make. All I'm after is little goodwill. For the future." It wasn't just the watch; there was a clock, too, somewhere out of sight. The metronome of minute-hand made Nines, who was kind of huffy about the whole thing, suddenly want to get the fuck out of this house. His ribs burned. But Shih's smile, cool artifice, wanted a bargain; he could not afford throwing it away.

"The future. You got a particular thought about what that means for you?"

"Well, yeah. I guess it's less of an thought, more of a feeling. See, I've been in this town a couple of decades now. Time's gone by, promises were made, yada-yada, you know how it works. And mostly, those promises have been met. But as the situation on the border—borders—changed, so did the context under which those promises were made. I've trusted Isaac's leadership less and less in these past few years. There's a charm about the way he does business, very old school, very cool, but the rest of us can't do that business—not with this Wild West crap going on, not with shots winging at us on the damn street. I mean, we've had Sabbat, we've got Hunters, then came LaCroix, and now the Kuei-jin…" He gave an incidental shrug. That's what a sideaways fucker always wants you to think, anyway. Nicky scratched at the short roots beneath his flip of hair. "Would you do a better job? I don't know, really. But I'm willing to bet a few bucks on you not doing worse."

"Wait a minute. Are you selling a protection racket to _me_?"

"No! God, no. Wow. Is that what you think this is?" He looked at Nines like it was a ridiculous suggestion and choked theatrically on a not-really-too-nervous laugh. "Holy shit. You think _I'm_ going to blackmail _you_? Have you looked in the mirror lately? Of course it's not a protection... thing. Gig. Racket. No way," Shih swore; hand on his breastbone, innocent surprise; _who, me?_ "Not my game."

Baron LA didn't like the put-on, or being talked down to, or hearing a Toreador laugh. "If you don't tell me what your angle is in this little deal, I'm going to run through my options, and right now, I don't care for any of them. We're talking. You've got some kind of exchange in mind, I expect."

"Not really. Well, sort of. It depends on how you want to look at it," Shih figured, bizarrely relaxed for a man who just jumped around in his chair, wondering if he ought to crack a grin. Conceit and courtesy; stupid game of musical chairs. Nines did not budge. "This arrangement wouldn't be public domain. Naturally. It's not the clan's business how I choose to spend my money, anyway. Fuck 'em. I'd call it my personal investment in Los Angeles. An investment you might find a little freer, maybe?—a little less self-serving?—than Abrams's contributions. No strings attached, hey? My goal, though, is just the same. I want a safer Hollywood in which to operate. But I guess I'm thinking ahead a ways—after these hunters, after Sebastian LaCroix. After Isaac, actually. If, just saying, it comes to that." An ominous, baited _if_.

 _If_ the State couldn't oust the bluebloods again, as looked increasingly likely— _if_ you were the Baron of Hollywood, who had never launched a direct offensive against a Camarilla court— _if_ you kept your proxy army just underfunded enough not to threaten you—then peace with LaCroix can be bought. This is an option for Isaac. It is not an option for Nines.

"I have one question for you," the Baron said. "Why me—what do you think I will do here that helps you people in any worthwhile sense?"

"As opposed to our current commander-in-chief? There are a few things I could say to that. Mainly, this is a crisis of loyalty. Loyalty, management, and fair treatment. I mean, let's just put this out there: Is it in your experience that Isaac Abrams pays particularly well?" It was a goad—a series of questions to answer his one. Shih passed it by before Nines had the chance to feel insulted. "Don't get me wrong. The guy's all right; I hold nothing against him. And circumstances being otherwise, I probably wouldn't have reached out to you. But this Leopold hit—this was my last straw. Our Baron has done maybe one step better than nothing to secure those of us worried about them. He's spouted bullshit and he's turned out some straw man patrols. He's watched his own ass, and he's been great at protecting his Childer—the same kids, by the way, drawing most of that bad attention in the first place. That gets you to thinking: _What am I_ _getting from this government, again?_ Why serve a politician who sends his police only as far as his pet projects? Why would somebody smart, somebody like me—"

"I'm not talking about Isaac anymore. You've told me your concerns. I'm talking about you and me. You keep telling me you need commanders. Why not make a run for yourself?" Rodriguez cut in. The freckle on his cheek was hard to see from a distance and in most light. "You've got the finances and I'm surprised a man like you doesn't try to muster the support."

Shih laughed again as much as he dared, a light, wary smattering. His front teeth were oddly straight and symmetrical. "Hell no. I've got no aspirations for that job. Too much limelight. Unlike the showboats that are my associates, I understand I work better offstage. And, forgive me if I'm throwing this in your face: I have no desire to stamp a bulls-eye on my head for Grünfeld Bach or Sebastian LaCroix." Nicky spurred thumb and forefinger to that wedge of a chin. Nines did not like the gesture. He looked more and more like a Ventrue the longer this thing went on. "You, though. Let's talk about you. You've been wearing that bulls-eye longer than I've been in this city. And, by my measure, you've still done a better job at defense than anyone I'm serving has. With some extra steam—an anonymous donation to your cause, for example—I'm willing to bet you could expand. Were you to need a burst of firepower in the coming nights. Were, say, in the foreseeable future—"

"Don't finish that. You realize what kind of a claim you're making, here?"

"I realize I have to look out for my own best interests. And I imagine you do, too. Whoever stands in the way of those interests, well…" A cluck of his tongue. "Bad decision. Terrible decision, depending on who we're talking about."

"I know who we're talking about. And before anything changes hands, let's you and me be absolutely clear about one thing: You do not propose something like this then beg off. You shake my hand, you are in with me. The whole nine yards—do you understand? You do not back out from this. If you have second-thoughts down the road, I will consider it a betrayal; Free-State LA deals with betrayal in a way you won't like."

A flat, thin palm hefted. It was not elegant, but was somehow persuasive its plainness, in the fade of piano-playing over knuckles. It was probably spray tan. Only in Hollywood. "There's no need for that. I know what I'm getting into. Though I see why a man in your position might be suspicious, understand that this isn't a personal issue for me," Shih reassured. He abandoned the table and crossed both arms, laid-back and worryingly cavalier, tilting his head. "I consider Isaac an employer. He's not a benefactor. He's not my dad. It's an exchange of services—nothing more, nothing less. And this is just smart business to me."

"And your other employer?"

Shih laughed one more time. In the confines of these sparse walls, it was an echoing, perplexing sound. "He's a spoiled prick. I'd be glad to see Rivers fall on that bitch-faced pout of his."

Crafty son-of-a-bitch said "goodwill," but he was proposing blood money to a general who might one day kick Abrams's chair out from under him. And if that worked out, who knew? Shih wanted to scratch his boss's name out right after Sebastian LaCroix's. He was willing to break a few codes and miss a few dividends for that possibility.

Nines didn't believe the word _goodwill_ any more than the pretentious polecat who cast it out here at him. Nicky talked about a new-better Hollywood, but what he really wanted was a seat at New Hollywood's head.

But Rodriguez does not care about seats in Hollywood, artiste Jyhad or trade reviews. Those debauched fucks are all the same fraud to him. He cares about the control Isaac Abrams plans to rip from him. He cares about backroom deals with Ventrue cobras, about sell-outs, and about what a choice deal Nines Rodriguez's severed head could win a Toreador Baron whose back was pressed against a corporate wall.

"You have my attention," Baron Angeltown said, and removed himself from the table. He had listening ears, dark eyebrows, and wrists that clinked steel when they moved. "Make a bid, give me an estimate, and I'll give you an answer."

But there was no estimation. There were no contracts or witnesses or settlements, no outdated rituals, no recorder. There was no afterparty or smoke or call girl. No one handed him a pen and warm document. Shih sat a briefcase on the table—discreet, buckled, adamant. Rodriguez eyed it dismissively. "If you think I'm going to sign a form on this, you are sorely mistaken."

The Toreador gave a small smile.

And he slid it—the entire thing—across that long stretch of stained wood.

Nines halted the case with one hand. It felt cold and expensive. Snaps clinked beneath the sudden weight of his palm, clapped on the hood; he twisted it around and unclasped it.

It was full of money.

Rodriguez said nothing, but he must've stared into that suitcase a little too long—with a little too much focus—because Nicky Shih's grin had grown five sizes by the time his new business partner looked up. The Brujah's complexion had gone woozy gray. His pale eyes looked vaguer under black hair.

"Don't thank me; thank Ash Rivers. He won't miss it between the paparrazo and the car wrecks, and Isaac will never know."

Rodriguez swallowed. There was a lump in his throat and it went down like a rock. "How much?"

"I'll let you count it," Shih decided, haughty son-of-a-bitch, knowing their pact was sealed. Nines's hands felt numb. He closed the briefcase. "Should come out to a solid few years insurance for you. If not, in time, there's more where that came from." A wink. "All provisional, of course. I don't what to count my chickens before they hatch. But I think—I really do think—this is going to work out. I've got that sense. Call it a gift."

There was a silence. The Baron did not need to say _yes_. His blank expression conveyed enough.

"Just so we're on the same page: I'm open to talking again, maybe working something else out, down the line. But this is a one-time arrangement. You understand my—"

"I understand your position. You will not hear from me," Rodriguez promised. "You will not be approached by me. But when this is over: I repay my debts."

"I could tell that about you. And it's exactly why I called. So please: put this to good use, walk soft, and I look forward to having a discussion with you at another time." Nicky Shih said goodbye with a smile, and then he nodded, pointing behind where the Brujah stood, towards paved Hollywood sidewalk. There was finality about that motion. You could follow it out to the thick evening cloudcover, to the humidity that would soon turn to rain, muddy the smooth driveways, clutter the clean streets. It smelled like a storm and park weeds outside. Pesticides, corrosion, unseen and consistent, unsettling the beauty of rich-boy hills. "Enjoy the rest of your night, Baron."

They didn't shake or drink or toast on it. They didn't hash out expenditures and titles. They called it a night.

Nines Rodriguez went home with a two-thousand dollars in his pocket and an option in the passenger side.


	64. Sibling Rivalry

Ash was upside-down across a sofa, scowling at the ceiling, juggling a throw pillow, and trying to keep perspective.

That's what Velvet was always telling him. _"You have to keep a little perspective, honey,"_ she'd drawl, recovering afterhours in the electric dark of a VIP room, that performer's lisp eroding her heavy, patient voice. _"Difficult as that is. Perspective is an important thing. It's easy, isn't it?—to freeze up and wallow. But I like to think that we are what we are for a purpose. If you can't believe that, what else is there?"_

She'd never try to answer to that. Maybe it was V's practical side. It's a line straight from the self-helps, from Therapy 101, and lazy-eyed shrinks who charge too much. Perspective is, apparently, nice couches and serious perfume. Whatever it is, it sure as shit is not neon-green strobe lights. Ash didn't like green, or like saying V's clinical word. Either way, "perspective" is probably a better justification for the parasite life than most.

VV had always been the philosophical sort. She'd been sharing barstool theology and smoking lounge romance ever since that awkward night they met, two glove-puppets on Baron Hollywood's fingers. Now, Ash loved Velvet as much as he loved anybody these days, as much as he would've a real sister. But he used to think her spirituality was weakness. "Perspective" had fisted his hands in his blazer pockets more nights than he cared to count. It inspired a hundred tiny, childish cruelties; nasty little thoughts of how useless five-dollar proverbs are; how stupid she is to hope. Over the years, he'd learned to bite his tongue and appreciate comfort. She is trying to comfort him. That's all this is and has ever been.

The couch pillow fell back into his hands and he squeezed it. It was a cheap cushion, diamond-shaped, synthetic raspberry—to match the carpets or her hair, he wasn't sure. Velveteen. Kitschy fabrics, cheap tassels, imitation vogue. This place is Hollywood. Imitation: the tackiness of Isaac's beloved Grauman's; the false history of gargoyles perched downtown; the glitz of Chinatown's Golden Virtue, choked between two cheap Korean barbeques where it sat out east. The collective taste of California's Toreador had plunged downhill in these last decades, and Rivers admitted his own smoke pit did nothing to remedy that fester. But it's business. That's what Isaac would say. This town always did have a penchant for the gaudy, and in _the business_ , you sell exactly what they want, as fast as they can want it _._ Abrams Jewelry, Cavoletti Café, shitty falling-star hotel. And his Sire still had the gall to play peacock with dusty Nina Simone and opal mafia rings.

Ash does not do green or gold. His eyes are a more benign brown, and feeling plain, they roamed the cramped upstairs of _Vesuvius_ , tired of playing catch with himself. He could hear the crowd thinning downstairs. Experience, both as a new manager and an old club-hopper, had let him in on the nightly rituals; business drops off at the four AM mark, and then you can breathe again, and wind all these pulse lights down. There are always a few stragglers. Stragglers, the most desperate kind of loser, clinging to the last slice of darktime. God knows Miss Velour takes pity on losers. She'd keep two girls working the mainstage until 5:45, dancing their feet into big bloody blisters, until daylight breached the patchy conifers. God knows Velvet throws nobody out.

This plush was beginning to itch, stick tiny fibers to his jacket. He studied the bulb-lit staff posters plastered around Velvet's dressing room with bored indifference. All beautiful, cheekbones and body. Nobody over a D-cup, because old V always did like to flaunt the biggest rack in the joint. She hired 'em toddler-faced these nights. Then again, what were pictures; what did he know? Cropped pixels, fixed redeye, a trick to iron out every feather-light sign of age. Ash wasn't sure. He hadn't spared the entertainers a glance.

Everything gets tiresome. "I'm tired," he'd tell her when she worried at him, asked what the matter was. He'd gesture at the plate of bone between his eyes and shrug. Fast cars, spotlights, winespills in private jets, acid taped on candy drops, LSD. You get tired of it all. They dissolved one day into monochrome. You get this vagueness—a haze, something surfy and lukewarm—that blankets everything, everyone. A nice thought, perspective. A security blanket of a thought. _Comfort_. He isn't Velvet; he knows what the problem is; there's no use dressing up.

Ash wasn't tired. Ash was sick. Sick of a high, sick of camera flash and fruity liquor, sick of bellybuttons rings, of dumb sixteen-year-olds with fake IDs breaking their ankles on Go-Go boots, of leather orange tan lines, sick of nicotine sitting with disappointment on his tonsils and sick of the smell of gasoline.

Most of all, though—most of all, sick of that sick old man.

Isaac thought this was about the theatre. Maybe a part of it was. Because God, yes, Ash wanted a stage back—wanted, selfishly but purely, that Hollywood second shot. He wanted a revival. He wanted another image, a spit-shine, redeemer-kid coat this time, AA alum, survivor of himself. But it wasn't just want. It wasn't just want, and it wasn't just art, and for him, it never had a thing to do with money, but those three are the only desires that old vine on this city tree could conceive of. His Sire's avarice was the simple and virile kind performers have. You had to admire that style of power, in a way. But if this schism was jumped as easy as skulking, disguised, into somebody's audition and dropping a monologue that blew a man's mind through his heart, Rivers would've found a cure. He would have made a salve, his own solution, a place to return to. Isaac couldn't understand. He sensed the hole yawning in his Childe and scrambled to fill it with something—trust funds, beachfront condos, this piece-of-trash nightclub on a summer dream boulevard. The Baron came with peace offerings, and to what end? It could be Isaac Abrams didn't _want_ to understand, and Isaac Abrams gets whatever he wants. Fame had fucked this golden boy—his head and his soul—but Ash didn't need it, and who in this town would ever square themselves enough to appreciate that?

He didn't need any one thing. He just needed. Don't ask him what that means, exactly, because the right words don't exist in any hundred-twenty-pages. He needs to get dizzy when he holds his breath. He needs to toss back a whiskey sour and feel lemon juice in his throat. He needs to do anything but wait.

His hair was a mop, a chestnut and pillowcase mess, and he raked one hand through it. Ash didn't bother primping anymore. Fuck it. Honestly—and this isn't ego talking, just truth, because this is how you learn to talk about bodies—even your own body—in showbiz—he couldn't pull off unappealing if he tried. LA had dubbed five-oh Blublockers and bellbottom jeans a Hot Look one month Ash Rivers decided to waltz outside like a bad sixties album, see what would happen, a little social experiment at large. Part of it had to do with clan. He's aware of that, but excuses don't make it any less frustrating, or funny, actually. Shit; Ash had tumbled out of an eight-car freeway pileup without one scratch on him a few weeks ago—just like that; blew right past an ambulance and back downtown, feeling like a deepwater diver—what was waiting? Paparazzi climbers, news media rejects, prepubescents vying to rip a few handfuls of Ash Rivers off Ash Rivers.

And they wondered why he was sick of this shit? Jesus.

Velvet stepped out of her private bathroom in the next moment, shower-fresh, damp locks in a plump blue towel. Pink was always her color, it's true. Not Barbie pink, but hot ruby. It bled the cotton in thin wisps, trailing down her neckline, dripping liquid dye. It stained the white silk of her oversized bathrobe, a simplistic post-show number that dangled at both knees. Steam followed the flat, sure steps—so different from those she walked with downstairs—through the doorway, clinging to cloth. VV was not a woman who sashayed behind closed curtains. She managed a quick, distracted smile for the man she called her little brother, however shitty his mood. And she was beautiful, Velvet. She always was, infuriatingly so—naturally, even, beneath the glamour and glitz. Water shimmered on shallow cheekbones and an oval face, mouth back to its normal size with the lipstick wiped off. His inverted position made the friendly expression look like a frown.

Ash forced out a half-assed, crumpling grin to show V he wasn't mad at her, not right now, but it came nowhere near his eyes. ' _Thank God,_ ' crossed his mind before he could stop it, though. He'd looked right to her feet when she'd come out of the washroom and was relieved they were bare. Those pinhead heels Velvet wore annoyed him. He always secretly hoped she'd misstep and snap one off. A mean thought, but not malicious. Little Brother just hated the fake ass way they made her move.

Toreador are unforgivably lovely. V especially so, but Ash knew she would've been angry had anyone else seen her like this—sans wax, glitter, and push-up. And his big sister would have thrown a bawling, misconstrued cow if she knew anyone actually preferred her without that stuff. Loud lipstick, false lashes, and soap opera eye-shadow. He didn't have a sensitive-nineties-guy grudge; he was plenty shallow enough to opt for airbrush and silicone. But God, this was V. Powders and mattes and pencil and gel; it was half the reason he only stopped by to see her after work hours. Skin made Velvet easier to talk to, less intimidating and less someone else. For their little family, warped as it was, had a code of honor: You always understand the nature of the stage. He'd stiffen when forced to address her in public. He'd roll his eyes. He'd begin to fidget and search for exists, mood darkening, wanting to draw a finger right through the matte on her face and smear it on the bottom of his chair.

The naked feet padded across her VIP room and swiveled into a mirrored desk, V's fingers twisting at her wet bundle of hair.

"There," she began, throat wide, caught between stage persona and reality, half honey and half a scaly thing. Velvet stared critically through the smoggy reflection as both hands continued wringing out water and dye. She made her low voice lisp in a way that wasn't real. "Sorry for keeping you waiting. I had to wash the workday off. You know how it is. I really am glad you dropped by; we haven't seen you out-and-about in a couple of weeks." Broad eyes, the color of glass; a disapproving glance in his direction. "Isaac was starting to worry."

Ash snorted: "I bet."

He swatted the tawdry throw-pillow aside and turned over on Velvet's too-small couch, onto his stomach, folding both arms beneath a triangular chin. The furniture was cheap and uncomfortable. He was used to it.

"You act like the Society could coordinate long enough for a sting on Hollywood. My place is clear. Has been for almost a year now," or so he promised, anyway, but had do it to VV's back, to the slopes of shoulder blades beneath the towel she'd wrapped around her head. There'd been a light hunter scare around his sister's scene last December; she'd upturned a pistol in a dancer's locker and fired her. Guns made V squeamish as all hell. Ash still didn't see how some stripper stashing heat under a combination Baldwin pinned her as an exterminator.

Velvet sighed, pulling off the cloth; her mane tumbled out in limp, moist strips. She scraped open the middle drawer and shuffled through lotion bottles until finding a comb. "Maybe. I still think you ought to be careful, sweetheart. The Brujah were just hit in the nose."

"That wasn't 'just.' That was months ago." But the skepticism of her look cut him off. He didn't bother fighting over it. She'd picked up the brush, and its plastic teeth were raking painfully, serrating the tangles, dragging them apart.

"And they still haven't recovered. Isaac something very strange to me just yesterday—something about Compton and the Hallowbrook pack mobilizing. It isn't our problem yet, you understand. But it could be at any time. Any time, honey. I'm not sure how downtown is planning to cope." Velvet turned her chair around, the angles of her ankles prominent, the lavender spritz on them a murky aftertaste of what it had been hours ago. She threw him a hooded, unhappy glance. Her thread-thin eyebrows forked up when his did not change. "I don't think it's quite paranoia if we make it a point to keep our eyes open until this settles down. That's what I wanted to speak with you about."

Ash gave the advice a shrug-and-nod. It was a customary thing for a brother to do—brush your caution off, not caring enough to quarrel. He knew VV was right. But he hadn't seen Isaac since summer; whatever news he got came through inferences, wannabe friends, and Toreador gossip. The young Artiste generally thought it was not his business what happened to States. Sometimes, though, Rivers could sympathize with the heady unthinkingness of that movement; they perpetuated short, violent lives, but they lived them, or at least they probably lived more than this.

"Isaac wasn't happy you didn't make the meetings last week," Velvet said, less than happy herself beneath the sleek maroon screen of hair. She wound it into a spiral, tucked it neatly over one shoulder. There beauty sat: clean, handled, honest, still. "You should give him a chance, dear. You really should. If you won't open yourself to knowing each other again, you at least need to find a place where you can speak to one another. We've always had safety worries, and now more than ever, we needs to communicate. It's dangerous not to."

"For who?" Rivers snapped. The catch in his throat was sharper than either of them expected. Velvet stared. He felt guilty. They did not apologize to each other or ask.

That's the formula in Hollywood, of Ash and Isaac and Velvet Velour. Ash was a toddler sitting on a living room rug. Isaac's shadow was paternal, daunting, and too big. Velvet could not be insulted away from that orb of influence and his honorary affection, his offer of being a second-place child.

He used to really blow up at her about that. Said some genuinely hurtful things, too—that her loyalty was so impenetrable she'd protect a pervert with it—that she'd choose Isaac over him, her brother. But Isaac was the one who made Ash her brother, she said, in the first place; _and,_ she said, _without him, tell me, where would I go?_

"Look, V. I'm not going to talk about this." Ash didn't suggest an alternative. "If Isaac needs me, he can send a minion with a memo. As usual."

She stared for a few minutes—nothing in her eyes—blinked them once, and finally, after what felt like an age, turned back to her desk. "Fine."

She was Isaac's creature, V. She was Isaac's from the blonde stoppers of her roots to the nails on her toes. But then again, when you dissected it, so was Hollywood, and so was he.

His neck was sore. He pushed out a sigh and dropped his face into that ridiculous sofa. God, it was hideous; it smelled like discount polyester mixed with horse glue, and made the vampire's head ache. This town is the West's big-fish manufacturer of the vulgar, gilded, counterfeit and overpriced. V's skin-joint fit right in. No matter how he felt about her, or thought he ought to, Ash realized the cheapness of his sibling's style of seduction, and how laughably poor her taste really was. Stepping into _Vesuvius_ was like chasing Pop Rocks with sulfuric acid. The sight of it filled him with a wicked superiority. Wicked, self-absorbed, punitive superiority—one chased by same old showtime bitterness, a shot on the back of the tongue.

But shit: _The Asp Hole_ was a tasteless nosedive, too.

Why compete? Ash knew Velvet loved him in the sad, sashayed glory of her narcissism, and was pretty sure he loved her, too. So what was the sense in circling upon one another like newborn sharks whenever their businesses brushed elbows, when Isaac watched? What was the contest? Tortured son versus amateur beauty—the daughter who, it always felt like, was more meant-to-be.

The word Sire means nothing to Ash. It's archaic and hackneyed, a page fallen out the worst script you've ever seen. He's never catered to Abrams's whims. He's certainly never bowed over. He's never come to heel whenever that man demanded anything: pride, satisfaction, entertainment, repayment, oaths. He was an Alonso's son; he'd cut his puppet strings on that first big-screen premiere. So he didn't waste time trying to figure out why their patron derived so much pleasure from kicking back to voyeur this miniature war, set off like sparklers, between Velvet (his better eldest) and Ash (his genuine baby boy). A vampire's virility is one of the first things to hit the chopping block. Maybe that's the source of all this dramaturge bullshit. Pitting his heirs apparent—blood-son and charity-case—against one another in a petty scrabble for the withering Baron's approval maybe gave Isaac a power hard-on. King Lear-level shit. Maybe it got the son-of-a-bitch off to watch them squirm. Ash hated that waiting, watching bastard so much it hurt him to breathe. He didn't have to, technically, and he didn't like remembering that fact.

Did Isaac love them? Isaac loved them when he could control them. He loved Ash Rivers when living vicariously through stardom was an option. He loved that VV's heart bled all across the ground her patriarch walked on. Baron Hollywood loved what he wanted to see in his twenty-first century brood—the shapeable qualities, soft as carving clay; the weakness that meant they needed him; the unmined talent—without any particular regard for their selves. They weren't children; they were wind-ups. Tilt back the neck and watch the doll blink.

"I can't make you talk to me, darling. It's getting to be morning, anyway; if there's nothing else, think I'll go home," Velvet decided. He could hear the stiffness in her voice. V didn't give him the satisfaction of a dented forehead or narrowed eyes. She stood in one lithe and resolute motion, taking three large steps towards the coat hanger to retrieve her trench, allowing him nothing but a sallow length of displeased back. The robe crumpled off and was replaced with thick black hide. Geisha-cold and comfortable in her nudity, she didn't rush or shrink from unflattering overhead light. Ten silver buttons sealed wide lapels up a tall white neck.

"Yeah. Think I am, too. Want me to dive you?" Ash offered, rolling off the couch in an unfazed thump of limbs. Fashion-shimmer stuck to his sports jacket. He was annoyed and tried to dust it away.

"That's sweet. But no thank you, honey. You just get back to where you need to be. I'll take a cab."

She double-checked the bath spigot and flipped off the lamplight before steering Ash outside. The way she took his arm forced him to be a gentleman. V acted like somebody's grandmother sometimes, a little strictness to make other people remember how to be civilized. He let her pose him, and then they were away, through the staff stairwell, out a heavy door. It was not a kind or sexy place to be on this side. Vesuvius's back exit was the least glamorous stretch of the night, scummy parking lot and sewer grates. They parted there in the absence of neon with a sisterly kiss on the corner of his mouth and his nose wrinkled up because it couldn't help itself anymore.

"Someday you're going to have let it go, Nathan," Velvet said, pressing cold thumb-pads into the dark grooves beneath his sunken eyes. Ash swallowed it like cough syrup. He took a step out of her reach. He didn't want to be here anymore.

"Bye," he said. Then, feeling guilty, like a little brother who didn't know how to be: "Love you."

"Love you," she echoed, waved as she walked away, and let him go.

Maybe she was right. At some level, Ash knew V was just as full of self-serving shit as the pimp who roped them both in. But if she was right—if there was some purpose, some reason for sticking out this sick thing—what did it mean for him? What did it mean for her? Ash had lived his life lightly. And just a piece of him was left now. One piece to wonder what it meant, to see if death can be as fleeting as that light life was, as rich and as thoughtless and as cool as the gold chain that hangs on a watch.

"It's not going away. Think about it," Velvet called, held up her hand for the cab and got in it, and then she was gone, and then he was, too.


	65. Taking Shots

Ms. Woeburne had thought about it for a long time (Ventrue being prone to obsessing), and she couldn't conclude whether or not Los Angeles really wanted her back.

It was the ninth of December before the displaced Foreman's answering machine finally picked up a message from Beckett. When it came, it came a surprise. There'd been little communication with him since that fiasco on the alley corner, and small wonder there; both had Sabbat issues now; though, Ms. Woeburne feels needs saying, her more so than him.

She'd responded to the threat in red-blooded bureaucrat fashion: by appealing to the local government. "Government" in this case meant business with the Scourge—and her contact was a stalwart, stern-faced, and spring-curled Gangrel, an Officer Benjamin who was responsible for monitoring Black Hand interests in Chicago. Benjamin had been more cooperative than expected, and she'd certainly been more discreet. Ms. Woeburne, you know, was not exactly forthcoming with every detail of her visit, something that must have been apparent. And spreading the news of uprising in California was not an option when Mr. LaCroix didn't yet know.

But Ms. Woeburne handed that in bureaucrat fashion, too.

Her apology for the fuss was a witness testimony (about a local murder, if you are interested to know, she had no involvement in; of course the testimony was a lie, and a neonate was framed). It sufficed. Officer Benjamin handed Prince LA's worried agent a rough map of enemy lairs, known feeding grounds, and danger zones. She said "for your consideration."

Well, Ms. Woebuerne considered it. You do know Mr. LaCroix would be _very_ disappointed in his representative if she got her brains blown out all over a curb—but at the same time, the enemy ought to be surveyed. So that's what she did—passively, remotely, diligently. Quite an impressive little report accumulated after a month or two of research. The Foreman identified each den, collected photographs and blueprints, cross-referenced some funny warehouse manifests with a suspect rash of "Independent" bank accounts, checked phone bills for correspondence to-and-from Los Angeles area codes, and approximated a few hazy patrol routes. This was all very prudent business, she thought, using boredom to her personal advantage. Coordinated terrorism is upsetting. Relating it all to Mr. LaCroix would be smoother and safer if she was backed by some cooked books and some dossiers. The wise corporal doesn't just point at disaster, after all, but offers strategies, and has already taken notes on how solve her Prince's newest batch of problems.

Sound advice, and S.W. stuck to her guns, which meant the investigation went on. Hard data is therapeutic to wounded Ventrue pride. More importantly, it kept her busy; it prevented the woman's circling mind from picking itself to mush.

And the months changed.

October and November whittled away. December now—autumn wore out its running shoes with a cold fork, solstice chill—and Ms. Woeburne began to worry in earnest. She still hadn't heard from Mr. LaCroix. While all this independence was motivating, at least, the Foreman wondered if it was an illusion. Perhaps he'd sent a spy to keep tabs on her? Exiling an operative only to have them followed did seem like a Sebastian LaCroix thing to do. She wasn't gullible (or foolish) enough to assume the disgruntled Prince would actually rely upon her mediocre negotiation skills, either. The prospect of every fumble being shuffled back to headquarters was highly disturbing to poor Ms. Woeburne.

 _'No,'_ her business sense insisted with all the confidence it could muster. _'No, it just doesn't stand to reason; it just doesn't hold up. If he knew it all, I'd be dead. Or arrested. Something, at least. And there's no spy; the Giovanni deal is too sensitive. I don't claim to understand why, but I can assume that. It's closeted. Classified. Mr. LaCroix wouldn't trust that knowledge to everyone—certainly not some mercenaries. He said so himself. It has to be me. It can only be me.'_

The speech smacked of grand delusions. _Me, only me! It's the Prince's command!_ Ms. Woeburne bit down hard upon her own tongue, a punishment for the narcissism of thinking herself so awfully important. Perhaps there was a spy; perhaps there was not; safer by far not to presume.

And a stranger, limper feeling: Whenever she managed to convinced herself _I am alone_ , there came an odd, unhappy breath of anomie. She felt unloved. It may have jeopardized her employment—it certainly would have jeopardized her health—but the possibility of corporate stalkers mailing their master daily updates was a strange comfort. The Prince might've been furious, might've lost a good measure of faith in her. But at least that would mean, in some way, at one time or another, he cared about what happened to S. M. Woeburne.

' _I'm sick,'_ Ms. Woeburne decided, snorted, and threw her glasses onto The Drake's mahogany lobby bar.

Precisely _why_ , you might ask, was a soldier of a Camarilla Prince lounging at the bar of her hotel, laptop spread over a dainty sheet of napkins, nose turned up at the Yankee Eggnog candle wax? The answer embarrassed her. And it most definitely annoyed a Ventrue accustomed to feeding on professional blood dolls who made a nice living by bearing their necks. On the upside, the clientele here smelled about right. Yes, entrepreneurs—upper-crust, detached, pink-throated white men, a practical, convenient taste for her to have. It's not like seducing a corporate ego is hard. Some flattery, a lashy wink, and presto: champagne in a three-button American cut. Sleeping pills in cola glasses. She put a bath towel down so as not to stain the three-hundred-count sheets.

Here is a tip for you from S.W., pro bono, generously: She who hunts near to where she sleeps does not want to live very long. That said, Ms. Woeburne is careful, and she wasn't worried enough yet to follow her own advice. Ms. Woeburne knows how to clean up. The bartenders were beginning to shoot her judgmental looks, but who cares, she thought. Who can be bothered to give a damn about being labeled a whore, a mercenary, a little wreckingball.

Instead, as Ventrue do, she worried about money. Since S.W. typically charged all expenses on the company card, the limited funds in her personal account had dwindled, meaning Ms. Woeburne was pulling out her fangs and then pulling out her victims' wallets. It did not settle well. Call the Foreman pretentious and overblown—you'd be not incorrect—but she believed herself a small bit better than this. It was another bite-sized insult flung atop the bank of them. _'Wonderful. Fabulous. One little Jyhad misstep, and viola!—from royal clerk to pickpocket.'_

The first night in Chicago—just to see—Ms. Woeburne tried her company credit card. She was denied. Mr. LaCroix had cut her off.

It had been very many years since our Foreman needed to worry about money. She'd left Los Angeles outfitted to stay a month, perhaps two, but certainly not three. Not her lifestyle, not what is expected of a representative of a Prince. Call her pretentious and overblown again: She would not dare write Sebastian to wire her a paycheck. This time, however, you'd be at least a little wrong—it wasn't pride, but practicality, and pragmatism, and, yes, not a little bit of fear.

It was maybe an hour later when Ms. Woeburne retired to her suite—leaving tonight's catch passed out face-down upon his pillow, her belly full of blood—to discover a message beeping on the machine. She didn't bother with 'replay.' The Foreman took one glance, recognized Beckett's number, and dialed.

"I'm sorry I missed your call." She skipped right over _hello_.

" _There you are. Right where I thought you would be."_ The meandering voice sounded pleased. She didn't have enough time to feel uncomfortable. _"So I suppose you don't have any plans for the evening, then?"_

"Not a one. What can I do for you?"

" _I'll be downtown shortly. A little personal work to see to. Why don't you take the number six bus and meet me at Roosevelt and Columbus?"_

The Ventrue grabbed for a pen and marked an inky blue _#6 Rsvlt/Clmb_ over three creases of palm. "I can do that. Is there anything in particular I should bring? No news on the Ankaran Sarcophagus you don't already know." She removed the computer from its zipped carrier and replaced it with her gun.

" _Just your sunny disposition, I'm sure. I'll expect to see you in ninety minutes, more or less."_

"All right. I'll meet you there," Woeburne promised, and she did.

**II.**

And once she wedged herself through the sardine can of city bus and out onto Chicago pavement, there the vampire was standing, just on the knee of the lake.

Museum campus stretched down the bank. A backbone of a World's Fair: tall bleached architecture, classical style, stark against the green grass crawl from the cold shore. It seemed shadowless. It _seemed_ immaculate, but at this hour, everything was backlit—dusky purples were kicked away by the deep undulating glow of water at night. Shade trees peppered the yards. Benches, trash cans, and playground equipment; they stretched between buildings with little reticence. Large silhouettes through darkening sky. The attractions list was short, for a mean, tea-taking critic: Aquarium, Natural History, and the copper dome of Planetarium. A city's worth of intellectual hopes crammed on one Athenian stretch of Astroturf. Thoroughly packed in daylight, no doubt; nine o'clock, however, meant the flowered paths and brick underpasses were untraveled. The knells were unoccupied; the exhibit doors had closed long ago. Gulls tittered occasionally, and the sound of saxophone from Navy Pier lowed, voices high on the barbed late evening air. Early December, clear and chilly, breaths like an icecube crunch; Ms. Woeburne missed her scarf as she passed through an iron gate and sought out somewhere to sit.

The bench metal was freezing through her thin slacks, so S.W. crossed a leg to minimize contact. Beckett was nowhere in sight. There wasn't much to look at, and she was bored. Nothing against parks in general, you understand, but she despised their target audience. Children are not her cup of joe. Ms. Woeburne had a cousin born once, Aunt Tab's dimpled daughter, her first year at university. Holiday trips to Dublin meant trying to hold the clambering thing—slightly away from herself, shirt straight, smell of mashed potatoes and ground pear unpleasant even then. Chubby tuft of blonde curls had cried whenever she'd come near. Tabatha swept in laughing that whatever perfume she wore must be disturbing picky little Suzanne, but our soldier-before recognized this for what it was: The child was scared of her. It did not like the way she touched it, the temperature of her hands. And Ms. Woeburne was not sure _she_ liked how easy "it" rolled off the tongue.

No children tonight. No one at all. She looked to her reading material, a freshly-unbundled _New York Times_. Settling in against the gaping blackness between the old white city buildings, steel and the persistent press of late autumn against her back, Ms. Woeburne flipped open the newspaper. She made a token effort to skim some of it. But her purpose was the same as it always was, and silly of her, and plain; she did not want to browse. She wanted one very specific article, boxed in somewhere on the entertainment pages, a place that would only interest a Ventrue with more motives than they'd let on. It was nothing important. It was a theatre review.

She read it all. But the last lines said:

* * *

_Madison Woeburne lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Soo Min, and their Pekingese, Charlemagne. He is a critic._

* * *

Lives. Present tense. Which was all she really wanted to know.

Ms. Woeburne is not particularly fond of drama. And she certainly had never been very close to her brother, who preceded the little New Year's Eve accident by nearly fifteen years. It was curiosity, mostly. A vague and needling curiosity—one that compelled her to snatch up a paper every few months. Sure enough, there he still was. Hell take the codger, for he must've been pushing seventy by now, but there he still was, and here _she_ was, still looking for a familiar name, set down on wood pulp in ink: _Madison Woeburne lives_.

He'd gotten liver cancer last year. Did an interview about it. The outpouring of support from the literary community was humbling, he said. He said _Mine has been a charmed and shambolic life_. He said I am a critic because I have questions; I suspect I will always have questions; life is about questions. He said thank you all for listening to me.

You had to bow to the man's tenacity, at least. They had that in the family. She did, and he did, too. Madison's work read every bit as pissy, elitist, and dissatisfied—as selectively, deliberately unhappy—as he had at a spry forty-one, when she had just begun working at LaCroix Foundation. Dr. Woeburne, who moved to Manhattan shortly following his second failed marriage, had won her legacy sway in a Dartmouth admissions office and given proof to Mother about why she ought to chase a PhD. He had done her favors and supported her goals—how could he not support goals that so faithfully mirrored his own?—but they had never been close, and there had never been reason for that to change.

She'd never actually known her sibling, she supposed. Beyond a parent's praises: _Why can't you be more like—? Look at what Madison is doing. Why don't you—?_ She'd received a generic greeting card once every year stuffed with three one-hundred-dollar bills and signed, _"All my love, Your Brother."_ He couldn't remember her birthday, so instead he sent along two envelopes every Christmas to cover the slack. They shined with pretty 50-cent pine tree postage stamps and were taped, always taped, not licked.

Madison seemed nice enough, Ms. Woeburne figured. He was more like and looked more like Mother than she was, and did. Like Noellene Woeburne, most suitable parent, who never permitted her children go ill-fed or undisciplined, and who never got too excited over anything. They had birthday cakes, board games, sack lunches neatly labeled with their names, and weekly chores paid with pocket change. They ate dinners comprised of dipping late MawMaw Eudora's crunchy chicken strips (a recipe Mother had sewn right into her muscle memory; her hands made mindless packets of them to freeze; _this will get you through the workweek_ , she'd say to her children; you might catch her after a shift, snoozing in the armchair, bonelessly eating her mother's cooking) into Grandpa Omer's Special Chili Hot-n-Fast curry (when he'd babysit). They had curfews and inoculations. They had big family Christmases because Grandpa Omer was intensely, spitefully Christian and tiny Easters because Mother didn't care about religion but always bought them chocolate. They were punished for sour behavior and silver tongues, and they were forgiven for their clumsy adolescent sins. Mother was a decent sort of person—of course she would be a decent sort of mother. It was in her nature. It was in all of their natures: staunch, reliable, sacrificial, pressers-on. And cold, too. A dry cold. A very dry, sober, bitterroot cold.

It shaped her and matured her and made her a getter, a listener, a loyalist. It made her able to stand it. It also left a resentment, a stitch in the daughter that did not tug that well-beloved, well-planned firstborn boy.

Ms. Woeburne could better understand Mother now that she'd grown an adult woman's brain. Times were different. People were different, a little, a bit. And Father, you know, he wasn't entirely wrong; they probably ought to have had her aborted, all things considered, money never being what it once was. They didn't get breaks or luck or good fortune. They got a wool-sucking, green-eyed baby girl with weak, twisted ankles and an uneasy, bashful sneer. She had wrecked an awful lot for them, to be just that blunt. Unplanned things do. It's not their fault—a thing can't help if it's unplanned—but that's what it is, and that's the trouble it's bound to cause.

She did not feel comfortable with the scarce, stiff hugs Mother rarely gave. She meanly thought she was prettier, cooler, because her skin was white. She'd hated her eyebrows all through school because, the girl felt, plucking and worrying, their strength was the only thing about her suggesting something not strictly European. She wanted to be exactly, _exactly_ like the beautiful, serious, frowning women who told the whole world the News. She wanted no history. Until Grandpa Omer died in his sleep one balmy night when no one but the children were home—and suddenly everything Pakistan and Christian and silly seemed important—and Noellene was ungrateful for assimilating, for working too much, for not being there to wake him up.

An obedient daughter—reasonably so—but not, Ms. Woeburne thought in hindsight, a very good one.

So it was fair. The all-right daughter had been tolerated, cared for, seen-to. She had been tended and checked-in upon. She had been worried about. But never loved. That was her albatross; she had rocked their tiny boat until Father jumped out, a man she'd never met, and so could never miss like the rest of them did. Ms. Woeburne always thought Mother hated her for that—secretly, in the privacy of her mind.

Oh, it was never so bad. Ignore her. She is only being dramatic.

Ms. Woeburne refolded her newspaper and deposited it on the sidewalk _._ A breeze was picking up and the Foreman wanted for a hat. She'd entirely blown off her hair. There had been some pride in that terse scissor line, too—a miniature victory in having done something that her Sire not explicitly, but implicitly, disliked. The strands were inching down now, tickling between her shoulders, where they began to crinkle, flirt and curl. Woeburne knew her mop would refuse to lie straight until it was a foot long, and she'd no intention of letting it get that overgrown again. She had too much else to worry about.

There was why she'd never be a stage speaker. Crossing both arms, the Ventrue's boot toe gave her discarded paper a dull kick. Its pages fluttered. With a fluster of lakewind, Madison, his writing, and her old names went tumbleweeding down the grass.

"Surely the stocks aren't _that_ grim," a blithe voice observed behind her, and Ms. Woeburne needed not turn around in a huff to know exactly who it was.

"Oh. No," she said, and pursed, and with crinkled eyelids winced out the most meaningless small smile she could. "My brother is dying."

Seriously, but not theatrically, as though such things still came easily to him: "Sorry to hear it."

"Yes," Ms. Woeburne agreed, pushing a breath through her nose as she stood. "So am I."

Then she was up, and moving forward, and thrusting out one prompt hand for the shake.

"Beckett. It's good to see you." A small grin to match the small lie. It was a painless lie, though. Those bargain rack sunglasses, the cliché hat, the leather coat sort of did make her a little bit happy. She shook too hard. The scholar's weak handshake was crunched.

"Likewise. I'm glad you could step out on such short notice. Apologies for leaving you clinging to the limb, young one," he said, and extracted his fingers from her more aggressive ones, only mildly apologetic. Ms. Woeburne doubted it. "I'm afraid I'm not very good about keeping in touch."

"No harm done," because being polite is much easier than being honest. "Your business went well, I trust."

"Still in progress, actually." He glanced across the wide field, landing on its principal building: a massive, flat-faced structure lined with colonnades, sitting on a dais made of marbled stairs. It was surrounded by tents, cornered with the bones of resurrected monsters. "Have you taken the opportunity to visit the museum during your trip, I wonder?" S.W. shook no; Beckett saw her brows, and offered: "Would you like to?"

"Would I like to what?"

"The museum," he repeated, patiently, knowing you really ought not to spring things on Ventrue like this.

"It didn't exactly cross my mind," was all she'd admit, and: "I suppose I could. Why not?" was all she thought of to say. An ambassador shouldn't decline. He could've just as nonchalantly suggested they raid the nearest Sabbat den; she would've said, startled but blank, the same thing.

"Excellent," Beckett told her. The grass was damp and the cement clicked beneath their shoes and Ms. Woeburne would probably be getting a headache soon. "Let's walk," he said.

And they did.

"But you do know," the Foreman added. She hiked up a gravel path behind him, and she puffed, a vestigial sound, more irritation than fatigue. They trailed around two ambiguous wire animals, beneath a cobbled pedestrian overpass, and past a long-dead block of geraniums. Petals shriveled gray under the impending frost. The stems were crunching into winter mulch. There were no leaves on most of the bur oaks. Far across the lake, where the current clapped boardwalks, it looked like a carnival: dancing, dining, a Ferris wheel spinning slowly along the back of Navy Pier. It smelled of damp dirt and glazed pastries. You could almost hear the roar. "You know that I have to ask: What does this have to do with 'personal work?' Mine or yours. If I may. And I think I may—I think I'd better—if I'm coming along."

He did not answer her right away. The edifice rose, glowing like mint December should, late light upon an open plaza where only they two stood. All this emptiness made S.W. uneasy. She stared through the row of revolving glass doors to a cavernous, unlit stillness on the other side. There was too much fog. The moon looked yellow and hungry over the building's back.

"Last admission was hours ago," Ms. Woeburne noted, futilely, not needing a pep talk to get the gist of what was going on here.

The Gangrel's nod was a quick downwards dip of akubra. "I'm counting on it. And true; you have a right to know the purpose of this little field trip. Let's just say a few miscellaneous bits and pieces of my collection found their way here, and for the sake of comparison to your Prince's sarcophagus, I'd like to get one back."

Her reluctance was physical: tightened facial muscles, a prickly nose. Beckett noticed and tossed the agent a placid smile. "Don't worry," he said. "It should be a fun time."

Woeburne's face did not agree. "Normally I wouldn't object, but I had no idea. I'm just not prepared. I've got no equipment…" (Save this dicey black windbreaker and a handgun crammed in a laptop case.)

"Easy solution. We won't be needing any equipment. There seems to have been—and this is purely coincidence—a night staff scheduling error," Beckett informed her, trench clapping behind him as they ascended two last platforms of steps. Ms. Woeburne hovered nervously behind. It disturbed her how casually he ambled up to the entrance, an unhurried pace in plain sight. "I don't know how a whole gaggle of guards managed to get the day off, and all at once, too—what rotten luck—but I'm sure we'll remember to snag the security footage on our way out."

"I guess we'll have to," the Angeleno scoffed. She was clearly less than thrilled, her body bunching up, palms rubbing the tingles from her triceps. They felt like goose-bumps. She frowned as the Gangrel waved her indifferently after him.

"I hope you're not going to jump ship _now_ ," he heaved. She had a sudden and embarrassing spike of peer pressure; this was one of those school dreams, too—one of the myths, much written about and rarely done—of two delinquent sophomores looking to steal the grade books and change the fate they'd earned. "We're already _here_. Also, I thought I'd fill you in on the Sabbat situation while we look."

Woeburne gave up. She pulled her weedy brunette into a rubber band bun, tugged her jacket straight, and hiked herself up those fifty stairs to break-and-enter Chicago's natural history museum.

"You drag me into some memorable meetings, Beckett. I'll give you that," the Foreman gave him, standing by while he broke a lock, and then following him through.

Everything is ostentatious about a such a museum. This interior was far more modern than the shell, however, which might've made a Ventrue laugh; every step up here took them beneath Ionics engraved with Estrucans, helms and spears. Inside, tile floors shined in a gymnasium way, with mellow emergency lights flushing the stucco. The yawning central corridor, high ceiling and broad sides, was stacked three stories and flanked with exhibit rooms. It was an impressive effect—hardly original, but impressive nonetheless. Ms. Woeburne still could not claim to be enjoying herself. She found afterhours disturbing: ancients and animals, walls too tall, its guts full of beaded cudgels and Paleozoic bones. Faux-Egyptian columns leant tackily out of a display. Two puffed-up bull elephants tousled on a platform just beyond the ticket booths. And, at the far end, skulked the masterpiece: a bristling tyrannosaurus, skin stripped, black holes plunging into its bulldog skull, a smile lined with teeth the size of ripe plantains. She looked conniving, perched there upon iron poles, bird legs posed in a slinking turn. Ms. Woeburne did not like staring into those sightless sockets, two-thousand bristling kilograms of seventy-million-year-old apex predator boring back down upon its contemporary. She had sixty kilograms. Maybe sixty and five.

The disconcerted officer clacked closely behind Beckett while he wrenched up a burglar-proof safety gate. They ascended to a restricted level, seeking the private storage rooms. Cramped economy labs reeked of insulation and spider poison, narrow passages barely fitting two side-by-side occupants at once. Tablets and charts at every corner. S.W. hugged her shoulders. It was quite nippy in here and she felt spooked—as though a door would suddenly slam. Museums exude that sort of unease. They like to haunt you, to groan around you, innards echoing. She hated this anesthetized, sanitary quiet. It was like Venture Tower. It was ambiance like a butter knife up the spine. It was potent enough that, when the Gangrel finally spoke, it nearly sent his accomplice leaping into an overhead lamp.

"I'd guess you're wondering what I've found out about the Sabbat," he supposed. Once she'd managed to flatten her hackles and collar her skittish nerves, Ms. Woeburne nodded yes.

"I should say so." But what she said was undermined by the indignation of fear; she sounded very like Sebastian, and it was probably lucky Beckett did not know what that meant. "I've been watching their exports from Chicago this past month, but haven't turned up anything conclusive. That might be oversight on my part. But it's difficult to access the information I'd need—not without storming in and actually taking it. Storming isn't really my M.O."

A tongue-in-cheek joke, nothing to be taken seriously, but Ms. Woeburne heard herself rethink it. Four outright attacks so far, and the bailiff from Hendon had come out on top of them all. Do you know, it wasn't half-bad. It was all right.

"It's fairly revealing," Beckett said, taking his time. He was the sort of man who relished storytelling, who drew out the twists into a drawling, audience-egging tease. "Why they're interested in the Ankaran Sarcophagus, that is. From what I understand, the Chicago Sabbat were contacted by your local branch in order to acquire those records from you. They've gotten some ridiculous notion about what's inside." There was a roll of his eyes, a flash of the tangerine there, and they proceeded down the corridor, peeking through doors every few steps. "That wouldn't be abnormal in itself; the Black Hand is fighting a losing battle with paranoia, and they lose ground all the time. But I think this might give you a second thought." The Gangrel winked at her in the shadow beneath his hat's ridge. "Rumor has it that your Prince's prize contains an Antediluvian."

Ms. Woeburne's brakes locked, she fell silent, and the Ventrue stared hard at Mr. Beckett's back as he meandered forward, search strolling on.

She burst out laughing.

"Honestly, through—" High, splintering, nervous laughter; the sheen on the dainty incisors. Ms. Woeburne watched with a skewed, stuck expression as the archeologist selected a closet, smashed through its glass window, and opened. She idled outside for a bit when he strode through. She was grinning vaguely, inanely. Her cheek muscles were beginning to ache. "—what is it?"

Beckett didn't bother looking back to reel her in. He took stock of the sparse chamber, a still storage area stacked with metal shelves and crates that spilled bubble-wrap. Must chuffed from all the cardboard. It smelled of radiator dust, air-tight packaging, and stillness.

"I didn't say what it _was_ , young one; if I knew, researching the thing wouldn't hold much appeal to me. I merely told you what popular opinion thinks. Provided that it actually does. I'm marginally relieved to hear you're a skeptic, though. You wouldn't believe the superstitions I've had to sit through from vampires much older than yourself. Ah-hah!"

He was smiling beadily at something—a small relic, sealed in plastic, stout, cylindrical, finely-carved and slightly crumbling. Worn cuneiform sat behind a layer of translucent, protective tape. It was a stone thing—weighed a ton, had a handle. It rested dully upon one cobwebbed cargo rack. It was, Woeburne estimated, just about the size of a Frisbee.

And, well—to be perfectly frank—she found it uninspiring.

"Poor kine. Historical priorities so confused. Why don't you scurry over and yank out that wire?" Beckett suggested, tilting his boxish chin towards a digital panel on the wall. Eyebrows stern, feeling rather befuddled, the Ventrue obeyed. But uncertainty had come to visit, and in that interim, her snickering had stopped.

The necessary cords were thick and telling and ran through a socket inside the roof. She pushed a small table into position so that she could reach it. One blunt heel stepped carefully onto the wood; one arm stretched. Balancing would have been easier had she not been so distracted by the comment Beckett made five minutes ago. _Antediluvian_ —a bad, burning taste, ridiculous as Sabbat and their prophecies are. Ms. Woeburne yanked the heavy black plug.

 _'Surely Mr. LaCroix wouldn't think—bah. He's an official. He's a pragmatist. He's trying to intercept it, obviously, before something happens. Before the Bishops set off a bomb because of some stupid religious pretext.'_ That sounded right. It relaxed her with its sense and its reason—hadn't it, after all, been Ms. Woeburne, with her cynicism and her smart mouth, he'd chosen to trust?

"I wish I'd worn better shoes for this," the Ventrue muttered, taking an ungainly backwards step down. A tiny blue bulb flickered out on the console; task complete. "I'm really not dressed."

"Yes, sorry about that," Beckett answered, not sounding sorry at all. He plucked his prize off its stand and splintered the casing over one knee, shaking away shards. "Hello, again," the Gangrel said, giving it a familiar heft and a little smile. This antique conversation piece slid quickly into his portfolio pack, a negligible bulge against worn stitching. He patted and snapped the single buckle shut.

"Why is it relevant? To the sarcophagus, I mean." Ms. Woeburne was blinking at him from a corner, chewing on one cheek, elbows jutting diagonally from her sharp hips.

Beckett blinked back, thought about answering, but instead gave only an impishly disingenuous pout. "Oh, it probably isn't. Just a stray curiosity," he dismissed, canines evident in the gloom. "But! I am quite pleased to have it back. The Field has one too many of my finds. Nothing imminently pertinent to our species, of course. Though there are a lot of museum vaults full of sentimental value for me. They've got a small treasure trove of my early research, just laying about and taking up space. Sort of tragic."

"It can't be too tragic. Surely a few clueless humans didn't steal from you."

The archeologist chuckled. He pushed open the broken door and wedged a toe in to hold it ajar for her. "Of course not. Oddities just tend to wind up in their hands after Princes discard them. Do you think yours is the first aspiring conqueror to enlist my help? Flattered as I'm sure he is, these arrangements aren't uncommon; in fact, they seem to be unavoidable. While it's not generally my practice to cosign excavation grants for Ventrue—forgive the prejudice; I'm not very fond of politics—they're damned good at obtaining things that interest me. I'm not quite sure how. Perhaps I ought to look into it," he hummed. This felt like a joke, but the officer wasn't sure, so she didn't laugh. "At any rate. After you, young one."

S.W. led them back through a claustrophobic hallway and down several stairwells until they emerged on Floor Two. She peered over its fat child-proof banister and towards the checkered tiles, still glimmering with promise one story below. The menacing theropod was just as fearsome from high ground, too. It was stuff from old nightmares: dark imaginings of children, not treacherous undeath. Either way, this twenty-first century hunter did not like the way its hostile mass made her feel. She shook off its crocodile leer and listened to Beckett's footsteps; their return trip brought them across concrete and carpet, past a long military line of stuffed mammals. Onyx eyes glared through the vented air. Rounding a perturbed white rhinoceros, Ms. Woeburne realized _this_ menagerie wasn't a great deal more soothing than the one downstairs, and aimed her eyes right for the nubby taupe rug.

"Why would anyone suspect there's an Antediluvian in the Ankaran Sarcophagus?" she asked, scowling. It was a legitimate question, but also good distraction from the godawful quiet. "I know Sabbat are doomsayers. Terminal paranoia. But why this piece, and why now?"

The Gangrel threw another flippant glance towards the chandeliers. "Who's to say? There's not much that slides by them without being dubbed a harbinger of certain apocalypse, particularly since the thin-blood onset. But best to not get me started. As for our _sane_ population: I imagine their reasons are equally insubstantial, caught up in God-fear from life. You could ask your Prince, I suppose. Though I'm not sure he'd have an answer. In my experience, Princes thirst after any object with the potential to increase their control, whatever its source, whatever its nature. Maybe he only wants it because everyone else does."

"I was thinking the same thing. Mr. LaCroix isn't one for hearsay, let me assure you. But Gehenna portents make excellent bargaining chips."

"Indeed they do. The last magistrate I worked with had set his sights upon a Mesopotamian queen's tomb. I breached it myself. Extraordinary artwork. Very significant anthropological find. But no enchanted Ancient's cache. He abandoned the effort completely. We weren't even done," Beckett remembered, and framed his complaint with unhappy harrumphs. "I'd pulled a decade's worth of data prodding around that burial chamber with scalpel and flashlight. And I could have spent a decade doing it, had things gone my way. But the case closed, the tomb was collapsed, and the Smithsonian ended up splitting its spoils. Unsatisfying end result. I suppose the venture was worthwhile, anyway."

"So your last tomb didn't have any actual value, either."

A dramatic black eyebrow rose on the explorer's face. "Not _supernatural_ value, perhaps, but it certainly had historical value. Take those, for example." Beckett pointed her to an enormous bronze pair of totem poles, eaten with rust. They screamed up like obelisks upon the center floor, glowering fiercely, once holy things, now decorating the stairwell more than anything else. Eagle beaks and chiseled mouths condemned the modern world. A sudden topple and one could've crushed human bodies into paste. "I dug these gentlemen up in the Yucatan back in 1833. Commission from a Spanish caliph. Was that ever a nightmare." He hopped the last six steps and about-faced, turning away from them, shaking his head. "You can imagine transporting something this cumbersome prior to the jet engine? And, after all that mess—four ships, no less—when they turned out to be mundane, what do you imagine happened? _'Bugger. That's too bad. Oh, well. Take them away, please!'_ It's a horrible waste. Unfortunately, most of our Elders can't recognize the worth of a discovery that does not produce immediate power. So I gave them to some kine scientists who might." A sigh. He leant forward against a brass guardrail and puffed out air.

Ms. Woeburne capped: "And here they are."

"And here they are," the Gangrel mused, crestfallen, swiping a fingerpad across the plaque. "Gathering dust in Chicago."

"Why not seize them, then? It seems to bother you. I'm sure they could sit just as well somewhere else." Ms. Woeburne knew she was missing his point, but her pioneering bone couldn't hold its tongue. She is a Ventrue. She fixes things; she doesn't loiter around waxing introspective.

Beckett considered, meditating on the question, on each frog and hawk and badger nose. Ms. Woeburne thought he looked awfully handsome at it. "If I need to, I will—hence tonight. But there's no rush. It's nice to see one's hard work does not go entirely underappreciated… even in these small ways, petty though they are." He faced her. "I hope Sebastian LaCroix understands that the likelihood of uncovering something to serve him—be it an objet d'art or a boogeyman in a casket—is very, very low. Please don't mistake me. I'm quite all right working with your people. Camarilla policies make it just hard enough to keep the real idiots from tampering with anything especially important. However. Ventrue are not known for their creativity, and I fear your Prince is slated for the same frustration so many of my sponsors have experienced in years past."

Ms. Woeburne dipped her jaw, tensed, and internalized. Stiff lips thinned around her teeth. "I think you know I can't comment on Prince LaCroix. But thank you, Beckett. All the same. I promise to make a point of how helpful you were. Now that our business is complete—if you don't need anything else, that is, and please don't hesitate to ask if you do—I hope to be back in LA soon."

Beckett nodded, pushing himself upright. The criticisms had passed, giving way to his usual personality—civility, but with a mean wit, and under a falchion edge. "I expect I will be headed there myself in time," the scholar said, smiled, and tugged his adventurer's hat. It was a friendly gesture. Bobcat eyes, dark gamboge, peered over the rim of glasses. "For now, however, I think I'll call it a night. Enjoy the museum, Ms. Woeburne. Don't forget to grab that film on your way out."

The Ventrue paused, double-took, and her eyebrow lifted.

"So you do remember my name," she said.

"Of course I do. I am supposed to be an investigator, aren't I?"

"Well," said Ms. Woeburne. Her hand was heavy. She frowned, a little bit, goodbye. "Small miracles."

Then they shook, and so she bid farewell to Beckett and the Garden City in one small miracle swoop.

**III.**

Later that morning—as Ms. Woeburne sat aboard a bus, scrunched between some snoring custodian and a nail-biting receptionist—she whipped out her cell and typed one brief, unencouraging text message.

* * *

**Requesting update. I'm done here.**

* * *

With that, she dropped the phone to her thighs, and tried not to punch the drooler beside her in his Adam's apple.

It was three o'clock in the AM, the air smelled of gasoline and human shivers, and Ms. Woeburne was inbound for her snobby little room. One of the last evenings, she thought. Countdown to a couple more hours here. It might've been one of the final nights spent tossing in Drake Hotel's crinkly bed, the final mouthful of foul-tasting Listerine, the final hunted contractor, and that buoyant possibility caught in her throat. She could be going back. She could be one city closer to going home.

 _'Best not climb too far on that tenterhook,'_ the Foreman reminded herself, a buzz-kill, but a prudent one. Chicago had treated her all right. All right, considering. She'd come spiraling in a wreck, and would go stepping out clean. It was as though an outgrown skin had finally been sloughed off, scales that'd stuck a cycle too long. It was a nice sensation, a too-small crab shell newly swapped. Maybe Ms. Woeburne had needed this trial more than a company readout could tell. She felt larger. She felt more competently Ventrue than she had before.

And maybe she wouldn't screw everything up so badly the next time a serving of bleu Jyhad got dumped on her plate.

Mr. LaCroix says this: If he has a shot, a Ventrue will take it. A Ventrue ought to beat it to the punch.

Chimney smoke autumn in Chicago is the muscular era Ms. Woeburne believes this about herself. And there is a time Ms. Woeburne will believe this of herself again. But it's cheap toughness, an untested assumption: "I will shoot." It doesn't mean much when you say it. It doesn't mean much when a good soldier talks.

Oh, you can snub the adage, and you may staple on whatever entendre comes to mind, if it pleases you. But you'd better laugh that entendre off loudly if you choose to laugh. Laugh all you like, for all the Ventrue care. Their philosophy may not be noble, and it may not side-eye its soldiers and sound smooth, but they've never needed to be either of those things. The Ventrue have taken states, motherlands, Pacific navies and whiterock shore simply by being the way that they already are: the first to take the shot. They do this because the Clan understands an unlovely truth about people, and that knowledge in turn shaves off an unlovely part of themselves. Did the Cossacks respect the Old Regime? Did Boudicca; did the Decembrists; did the American sharp-shooters lying on their bellies in a riverbed? No, they did not—none of them did—and so it's best to leave the ethics of colonialism to some smaller, more agitated persons. It's best to be brutally efficient when you decide to take over; it's best to toss that soggy, gray meat bone of morality to the side that will lose. It's a nice consolation prize, to feel righteous. It must be nice to have poetry on your side, to be romantic, to believe someone evil has done you a wrong. But they may feel all they want, those losing, righteous peoples, for those who have won need not have the pity to care.

Ventrue kill and clean. They strike preemptively; they slosh across the Rubicon on grim shoed horses; they rifle elephant hearts. They'll build railroads into your Russian hinter; they'll volley at Hannibal; they'll firebomb your clever double-flank. All of this is what Sebastian LaCroix tells her, and it is all true. And it is probably good advice—you know Ms. Woeburne is the type to follow good advice. She is tactical, not proud. But—and this is questionable; it is up for debate—if you were to ask someone who is detached, who is not S. Woeburne, for an honest answer, he or she might whisper you this. The tin soldier talking to you has never been in a position to offer mercy. Not really—not to speak of. She is too metallic. She is a product of colonies. She is too short-sighted and too small.

Ms. Woeburne doesn't know what she's talking about. She's not the type of person whose decision it is to hold back an axehead or to not-take a shot at the throat.

The ringtone barely won out against the sound of Greyhound tires bouncing over potholes. "Woeburne," she said.

" _Look, don't ever send me that shit. I don't have time to mash buttons."_

The Foreman sneered, a wicked, superior tear across her flinty face. "Hello, Mr. Rodriguez."

Rodriguez must've heard the match strike, because it was suspicion now. A squint, a short-fuse. _"Yeah,_ hello _. If we're going to be creepy, I'm hanging up."_ Static was dysfluent through the general growl of a Brujah voice. She could hear an engine in the background. _"Make it quick, London. I got things to deal with and you aren't high on the list."_

"Be calm. This is a business call," she smacked, lunging away from the sleeper at her left before he lost another spit globule. It would have fallen directly into the pocket of her jacket. What a disgusting end to an evening that left her pride otherwise intact, and a sack of security footage dissolving in Lake Michigan silt. "I haven't heard anything from the city. I haven't checked with Venture. I haven't had reason to disbelieve you did what you said. But I'd like it straight from you, if it's all the same. So here's hoping you can, and you will, tell me what I need to know: How is the Sabbat situation?"

" _Quiet,"_ a two-syllable grunt of a word. Woeburne reached for the bell-cord and re-buttoned her jacket.

"I wasn't expecting quiet. But I'll take it. That's good news. That's lucky, I suppose." She sprang up, right heel misstepping, hooking an arm around a stanchion to stop her stumble. The doors wheeled open. Someone accidentally palmed her behind. Ms. Woeburne glared at everyone she could manage in the few seconds it took to get through the door.

_"Good news? Maybe. Luck—I doubt it. I've been sending a field crew around Compton."_

"Maybe," she agreed, snidely, not enjoying the ego game. S.W. ignored a painted street performer and clapped into The Drake, elbowing the door, rudely waving off its bellhop. The boy gave a snort he didn't think she could've heard. "You do realize a few raids aren't likely to—"

" _Six raids,"_ he cut. _"And I've had a four-car patrol down there since Tuesday. Do you want to keep telling me how to do my job?"_

When an enemy gets results, it is better not to poke holes. It is best not to ask. "No," she said. "I apologize."

" _You wanted to know. I told you. My point is that they're being kept busy on the south board. So for now—and you understand this changes at any time, it is not just my issue—the situation's been—"_ A horn bark. Someone's hand walloped down hard on the leather steering wheel. _"Son-of-a-bitch!"_

"Excuse me?"

" _Not you. Talk more,"_ Nines invited (some invitation), but Ms. Woeburne detected the restlessness, a tightness of a mouth. She identified with that expression. There was some idiot Angeleno honking away out there, some road-rage upperclassman laying on his Mitsubishi's noisemaker, not at all aware. There was so much else to worry about. There was entirely too little time. _"You're 'done there,' you tell me. Done with what? You never said. And you've yet to really explain to me what exactly this is about."_

"What I told you is true. I'll be back to LA soon. I'll be back to review, and if I approve of your management—if I approve of what you've done with what I gave you—you'll have more information then." The Ventrue stepped into an elevator and rode it to her floor. It was uninhabited at this impious hour, thank the Fates That Be, and she leant heavily against an upholstered wall. "Please do your best to make sure there isn't an Anarch death squad awaiting me. I don't know how the Pier went over with you people. Frankly, I realize it's not my business."

" _I doubt it."_

"I do—and I acknowledge that you have been facing this other dilemma largely without my help. But. Considering all I've done to make life easier for you lately, what I'd _really_ love is a guarantee of political amnesty once I'm home."

There was a pause—then another one—then what could probably be described as a yes.

 _"You know,"_ Rodriguez decided. _"I think I can do that, senator."_

"I hope so. Good evening."

" _Yep."_

Connection closed, Ms. Woeburne stowed her phone, slipped into the spotless bedroom, and locked its door with a keycard swipe. She stripped, splashed her face, and sprawled across the itchy bedspread. She let her hair down and she put it away. She shut her eyes.

And she slept.


	66. Disaster Plans

It took him a minute.

Ms. Woeburne hadn't lost the hall monitor spit-shine of Camarilla bitch. The good manners, the worse soul, the chronic overdressedness, that _clear-out-of-my-way_ way of walking. Oxford neckline, shoe leather, scale belly. Briefcase bag, pretentious watch, that dark stuff around the eyes he didn't get the purpose of. Deliberate knee-highs, compensating shoulder pads, cufflinks trying to make her more imposing. Kind of woman who looks like she fell out of a Fascist Fashion Quarterly. She had a weak-ankled hesitation to rush down steep stairs and all those sharp, tiny teeth in her head.

No, Woeburne was still Woeburne. So why the hell he needed a second look to recognize her, pushing right out of that glass door and onto the pavement, Nines Rodriguez couldn't say.

He'd been watching the incoming flights on the overhead. UNITED 308/DEC 17 landed at exactly 11:09 PM; 11:31, she trotted out on Los Angeles International's Arrivals Lot. Woeburne took a look around—wrinkled her nose at all these reuniting families, all this holiday tinsel and their bags full of presents—then marched off down a striped stretch of sidewalk without seeing him.

The Brujah whacked his palm heel thrice into his truck horn.

The Ventrue whirled around. When Woeburne turned, and her kind of snake was a bush viper: bright grimace, maroon mouth. She'd been trying to hail a taxi, and it left her right arm awkwardly airborne, but don't let that fool you. Little green corporals are always prepared to spit venom in faces. It took the Ventrue about eight seconds to spot who'd beeped at her, and the snarl transformed into an expression of dismay.

Dismay turned quickly to anger, though—and then she was up to his car with footsteps like slingshots on tin.

"Sieg Heil, senator," he said when Woeburne was all of a sudden right there. "Nice bootheels. Merry Christmas. How you doing."

"What in the hell is this," she demanded. Those little teeth gritted; her lip curled; both shoulders pressed for her neck. Must be said, though. The look on her face was pretty priceless. She shot an anxious glance this way-that way, like she was hunting for Camarilla paparazzi.

"You said you wanted amnesty," Nines reminded, and gave the passenger side a pat. "Amnesty."

Her whisper was loud and dangerous and pursed. "NOT EXACTLY what I had in mind."

There was terror, too. If you looked close. She looked a little terrorized—a little serious, knowing there might've been something halfway down her throat she couldn't chew. From the nose up, no matter what boots she wore, S. Woeburne wasn't an officer. She looked like any old pointman shoveled out of a foxhole, waiting for bullet to whistle, fork a right, and smash right through the pearls in her ears.

The Brujah gave Woeburne a sobering look. Nobody was teasing anymore. "We have to talk damage control. I have no time to humor a scene. Get in."

Woeburne was having trouble being told things. She stared at him—hard, thunderstruck, and not to be trifled with. "No," she spat, two steps back, peripherals searching. "I will not. I refuse."

"Ventrue, don't make me get out of this car," Nines bitched, trying to seem like the grown-up here, to avoid the drama of the thing.

"You get out of the car—" She didn't buy into him, but he believed her. One seam twitched into the skin beneath her eyes. "If you open that door, I'll shoot you. In the throat."

"You think I need to go through these motions, my intention was to kill you? All I want is to get a few things clear," he told her, the truth, not that she'd accept it. Woeburne was still caught in that hangtime snarl, fingers flexing around the strap of her satchel, steamed suit and cuffed sleeves and a subzero look. Ventrue know they are dangerous, with or without a gun. But they also realize their strength is in planning and numbers, and have the capacity to recognize when they are caught, relatively, alone.

"I made myself clear. I told you I will review the situation. You have no right to expect that review happens under your terms."

"You flagged me down. Now I'm flagging you. There's things we could stand to talk to each other about, and the sooner that happens, the better for us both. You don't like what I got to say, bail. This is good intentions. I'll take you wherever you need to go."

"I don't care what you have to say. Why are you _here_?" Woeburne was not wearing a shiner or trying to hide a mistake this time; she was in a position to demand from just about anyone, and to use the word _expect_. "You can't expect me to go along with this. You can't expect anything from me. I'm not prepared to do this right now with you, do you understand? I have no assurances. I'm not equipped. Whatever it is, this isn't the place." She wasn't wrong about that. Woeburne wasn't wrong about much. She was pretty pissed off. Her patience was unraveling; her fascist-ish boot heel stamped down as she looked down the fairway and sucked her front teeth; there was getting to be a risk in sitting here. "My god, why would you do this? Why would you imagine this is an acceptable way to speak to me. For fuck's sake. On the side of the road."

"LONDON." Nines's fist wrapped around that neat collar and yanked the Ventrue downwards. Her palms shot out reflexively and whumped into the door of his truck. "GET IN."

London stood there for a shot, pouty moment, deliberating on the consequences this shitty proposition might bring into her life. There was a forlornness in the apprehension, though—a sense of loss, of inevitability, that knows better than to get distressed. She didn't really have any good choices. Here, or anywhere. Woeburne really wasn't prepared.

The Ventrue's expression slackened, oxygen making her stomach weak. She couldn't believe nobody from HQ had appeared to save her yet—that there was no company car waiting to pick her up—no guards sent to prevent something like this from happening to her right in the middle of the airport. You could see the tippy-top of Venture Tower from here, a rhythmic wink of lightning rods through the purple nighttime smog. A little corporal's delusion of relevance was unstitching, and it was difficult to watch. Almost made Nines feel a little bad for her, so he let her shirt scruff go.

Woeburne rubbed at her clavicle, swallowed. "Christ," she said.

Tired of wasting time—wanting to be mobile, to be somewhere ahead of where she was now—the Foreman hefted her modest luggage, tossed a wheeled suitcase into the flatbed, clacked around, then finally clambered in.

"Merry Christmas," she seared.

He pressed down his foot and went.

By the time Rodriguez looked right—to make sure she wasn't up to something she oughn't be—the Ventrue had slouched mightily, nose bent toward her collarbone. Safety lights on an ostentatious, downturned face. A hand cupped her brow as though she was trying to go unnoticed by someone, concealing the sour, sulking features. Woeburne smelled impotently of toothpaste and aerosol, like herself. Her head was the same dull ascetic brown. It was longer than he remembered it being, though. Rodriguez double-checked his rearview mirror.

"Your hair's different." They rolled behind a coral Toyota full of hiking backpacks and a golden retriever.

She shot him a hateful look. Her different hair shifted like the back of a pissed-off cat. "Is it. Thank you for telling me. I hadn't noticed."

The Brujah shrugged. "It's alright."

"Thank God I have your approval," Woeburne shot back, dejected, feeling pretty well left alone with her curling fringe and her beat-up surroundings. She was sliding into a shotgun puddle. The Foreman was nearly eye-level with the airbag now, and completely miserable. Pity party, pity party. Poor little rich bitch. Her life is so hard.

Nines Rodriguez never forgets who he is, so he never forgets who she is, except sometimes he does. He forgets what being a Camarilla cadet probably means: special treatment, eagle-eye, Sheriff's shadow, blood money checks that must one day be cashed. London is self-realized enough to know she won't last there forever. All the benefits of nepotism have come with a choke-chain. It gets tighter, and it gets colder, and it gets more painful every step away from the house a bitch takes. She's not a lapdog; she provides a service. She runs down rabbits. She's got a nice bell-collar on, nice clean teeth, but one of these nights, that collar is going to get small—small enough to cut off her air, to snap the stuff inside it, to disconnect the skull.

He thinks she's arrogant to approach him like she does, and that's true. But at this point, what can Nines Rodriguez possibly do to her? Tie her up, hurt her hand? One of these nights, she's going to find herself worse than hurt: she's going to find she isn't useful anymore.

It probably is a not an undifficult thing to be Ms. Woeburne.

Nines watched her fumble tote buckles, searching for a cigarette. He added: "Dumb hat, though."

Woeburne got one between her third-and-forth fingers, panned his passenger-side window two inches down, and afforded Rodriguez a principal look. The ugly black-knit Gatsby she was wearing went nowhere. "You know," the Ventrue snapped, rummaging through his dashboard for a lighter. The Baron heard paper crinkle and frowned. "Why not. That's fine. Why the hell not. I'm already here. While I'm at it, why shouldn't I kick up my heels, slap on a smile? Get a giggle in? Get over yourself fast, Brujah. Because I am one comment away from—"

"Fair—last one. You look like a goddamn ghost. Something happened to you. What." The taillights turned his face blank and his dark hair a weird shade of blackbird blue.

Woeburne's fingers shook as they lit up. "Nothing," insisted the brisk little bean-counter from Venture.

Nines blinked unimpressedly at the road. His hands were heavy on the steering wheel. "Nothin," he said, just to make sure, just to be clear.

Woeburne's jaw flexed to hear herself parroted in that doubtful, pseudo-sly drawl. "No- _thing_." Her knees shifted uneasily beneath the nylon and the knapsack. "It's nothing in particular. I'm not feeling too well, is all. Migraine. My stomach is upset. It's just that," she brushed. She breathed out. "I don't like flying."

He let her chew on that excuse for awhile. The traffic was slow and she did her best to ignore him, nursing that airport store Marlboro. Bad acting. Bad smoking, too. It gnawed at her guts like ants on a dead finch. Silver flickered sidelong in her direction.

"You lie like shit, London," Nines observed. She lifted a shoulder impassively up and down.

"Think what you like."

"Trouble in the West Wing?"

"Sure. Why not."

"Either something happened to you, or you happened to somebody. Which one is it."

"It has nothing to do with you," London informed him, though he could see, for all her coolness, the wrist under that cigarette. It wobbled for a moment before she cracked her carpals and fixed her slim, solemn watch. "It's not your domain. Besides, I've shared more than enough intel to deserve your respect of my boundaries, I think. So." She waved some smoke around. Nines could tell Woeburne was faking it, but political pressure surfaced the parts of her composure he admired. London always knew what she was doing, or frowned like she did. He could have used a Ventrue in The Angels; he really could've.

"So what?" Nines asked.

"So cut your losses. If that's why you're hounding me, you might as well pull over. You may as well and find me a taxi. I have nothing to say. But if you want to discuss other matters—more relevant matters—I am listening. Otherwise, I am finished. And we are through here."

It's raptorial, that look—whittled-down predator, result of evolution, like a bristle of sharp green feathers up the back of a dinosaur. The way she cocks her head to the left and stares is deathly in the way only Ventrue can be. There is a seed in there—a conqueror cell. You know what their species can do to your mind. You can never stop thinking in a Scepter's presence. Think of anything—prime numbers, presidents' names, state capitals, what you're going to do with the rest of the night. Think dance steps and how many bullets to what type of gun. Neutral things, impassionate things, things that lead you one-to-the-next, no trouble, no tar to boil out of you. He can see the glint of her bottom teeth, the minor fangs. A bad feeling scrapes up the spaces in his spine. Suddenly there's a stirring of old fear through all the old anger in this old Anarch. If you name is Nines Rodriguez, you have been killing snakes in the heat of your dreams for a hundred years, husking their hides with your fingers, chopping them up. But that war goes both ways. A snake has also been killing you— _you,_ specifically—in the hot desk light of her office; she has drawn the schematics; she has twelve dozen terrible plans. She is up late nights making your list. She already knows what your blood will look like outside your body. Those are the odds biology has given you to fight. The real danger of a snake isn't in the poison. It's that they'll wait 'til you're tired, 'til you're home safe, until you can't remember she's there.

"I understand you," Nines told her. "We'll leave it alone."

It was good enough. Woeburne lost her rattle, set down her guns, and veered back into herself. "God! It's so damn hot," she swore. The raptor transitioned to a bureaucrat again, unbuttoning her jacket, tugging off the sleeves. She threw a gesture toward the bumper-to-bumper departure traffic backed up a couple rows thick. "Some winter. Would you look at all this. This is a disaster. Who organizes this? We're going to be stuck in the turn-around forever. Can't you—?"

"What exactly do you want me to do?" Rodriguez ruffed. There was an SUV crawling in front of them. He felt more irritated about being hassled by her than he should have, and right then, regretted it; he wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere open, not stuck inside with a dinosaur.

"No, I know, but." Whatever Woeburne knew-but didn't quite make it. That unattractive hat brim slid forward over angry, tired eyes. "Disaster," she said again. She took another deep breath of smoke and choked.

"Try not to die before we get out of the airport." Nines looked critically at the cigarette. London smacked at her diaphragm to get a hold of herself.

"Cheap chauffeur."

Rodriguez glared, too—an honest glare rather than a fake smile for sad little Ventrue joke. He shoved a boot toe into the breaks, jerking her forward and toward the windshield glass. It made the seat belt suck in. People beeped, but she got the picture. Woeburne grabbed her jugular, cigarette breaking in two. Her cap tumbled onto her thighs. They sat there unmoving for a moment as cars around them chugged to another halt.

"I'm not playing games with you, Woeburne." London looked back at him with distrustful, worried eyes. "Let me tell you what this looks like, because I don't think you're aware. I don't think you thought this through. You were gone four months. We hear nothing from you during that time. Then one day, you call me out of the goddamn blue with this wild Sabbat story. But you don't come back with a Girl Scouts badge and a danger bonus. You don't come back at all. That big fucking mess, that business of yours that just can't wait, that shot at your ass, and you stay on for… what? Ten weeks? Twelve? And according to you, you stepped around the Prince to do it. I'm not supposed to talk to you about that?" His fingers tightened. He was singeing the asphalt ahead with the far-off expression of mercenaries who are very deliberately not-told. "And now, without one fucking clue why, you come flouncing back, pretending nothing ever happened. Bullshit. I'm not going to take that."

"Well, that's interesting. Because you took everything else. You took what I offered, and you agreed to the terms attached to that offer. I gave you information. I gave you time. I gave you leeway. But we're calling that nothing—is that right?" she squawked, pissed-off again. Her nails sank into the soft hat, killing it, looking like eagle's feet. "Expensive corpse."

"I am working with you. You do not get to toss me dog bones. You're flirting with our livelihood, here, Cam, and I have very little tolerance for fucking around."

"You're entitled to nothing; hold on to that knowledge. If you don't want my—I'm sorry; my _bones_ —keep on picking the trash. That's got you far."

There was a bang from the weight of his palm as it lifted and fell atop the wheel. Woeburne jumped; her clever, preemptive thumb had wormed its way around the door handle.

"It's been a joy," she said. "I'm leaving."

"Listen—" Rodriguez tried to make it sound less like a bark than it was. He squeezed the wheel tightly again. He breathed out deep and slow through his nose. "I don't want to fight about it. I really do not. You want to go home, I'll take you. If you want to run straight to your tower—fine. I don't care where you go. But you are not getting out of this car until you tell me what happened in Chicago or I am not a team player in this anymore."

All that growling about Chicago, and she had one small detail to obsess over. One small detail, but with a big implication; one she couldn't stand being repeated, and couldn't permit being said. "I didn't 'step around the Prince'," Woeburne insisted. She'd been thinking about it. "For God's sake, what was I supposed to do. I was ambushed! It's not like I took it to the bank. My life is in danger. Was in danger. What would you have done? I had to look into it, and I couldn't do it from Los Angeles. I'm going to tell him," she swore, heels tapping staccato on the floor. "I'm going to tell him the minute I get back."

"So you just came across that little Hallowbrook scheme by accident." Rodriguez was understandably unconvinced.

His only commitment from her: a nod.

"You make me very nervous, London," the Brujah sighed. And she was not amused by this at all.

"I really do hate it," London said.

"What?"

"Flying. I hate to do it." The Foreman pinched the bridge of her nose; her excuses were bogus, but the headache was real. "I really do."

"Heights?"

"No." She looked tired. "Falling."

Bullet dodged, Woeburne hunkered back into the cushion, arms crossed, and mulled with half-lidded irreverence on what a series of personal injustices her life was. They inched a few yards forward, making incremental progress. When the Foreman had festered enough, she hacked another glance at him, and was taken off-guard to discover the Anarch glancing back—caught in a question, head tilted, pointing at his nose.

"Oh," London muttered when the gesture clicked. "Yes. Little mistake. Left them behind."

The revelation seemed to settle Rodriguez's disquiet somewhat. He turned hand-over-hand on the wheel. " _That's_ what it is."

"That's—" She rolled the window down partway and threw her broken cigarette halves out. "—what it is."

The Ventrue, impatient to move but in no hurry to face what waited for her, studied the traffic ahead with her glassesless face. Someone hopped out of their car to pull bottled water from the trunk. A yellow dog was yapping stupidly, monotonously in a backseat. Woeburne chomped her cheek and anticipated being attacked again. Five minutes, and she wasn't disappointed.

"I see you don't want to talk about this. That's your prerogative, Cam. But if you're going to do what you say, don't be a moron about it. You do not play chicken with these people. I don't care who you tell; Sabbat ambush is not something a smart kid, or a smart Cam, keeps to herself," the Brujah cautioned, though it felt more like chastisement than honest advice. She could see displeasure in the faint grooves tightening both corners of his mouth, and recognized that it was absolutely in Rodriguez's interests whom LaCroix's corporal told.

"I didn't keep it to myself _._ Obviously _._ You're here," Woeburne cracked, insolence that made his temper backstep again. Nines glared.

"And there's a reason for that. I know damn well you didn't pass me everything you turned up in that den. I'm also pretty fucking suspicious about it." London honked a no-kidding snort he ignored. _"_ And, this little dance to the contrary, I know you aren't the asshole you're acting like. Otherwise we wouldn't be having this chat. I'd have smacked you one, bowled you out, and taken that bag." Woeburne, affronted, hugged the satchel to her torso, but he knew there was nothing of value. She wasn't a moron, at all.

"Threaten me," the Ventrue spat. Her glower was full of noxious green things old hate. "It worked so well last time."

Except Nines pulled out of the airport cul-de-sac and onto open highway. They fell into post-rush hour like that, empty bullying, blocked by the knowledge that neither could deliver on what they said. Palm tree fingers snarled in dry winter wind. The big streetlights fought back a wide, LA-variety darkness, headlights igniting them both in swift, diluted orange as cars, cones, and exits passed by.

"You've been a smart Cam this far, London," Rodriguez granted. She was not feeling 'thank you.' "I can appreciate that. I do appreciate it. So I'm going to clue you in on this Sabbat thing, do you a favor as much as I can. You can't bribe a fanatic out of blowing your jaw off. What you need is backing; you need security; you need a response plan, one somebody can organize and keep up on. This is not a job for contract military. You need to understand you are now a target. If you can't deal with it…" He looked expectantly over his shoulder.

"I assure you, I can deal with it," she shot back. A harsher thought surged up but was bitten down. There were times London seemed younger than she might've been—maybe a half-century dead—but it wasn't warfare Woeburne was afraid of. She was afraid of falling. And there's nothing a Baron or a Board or a crown can do to stop that.

"You can't, you'll die," he told her. That's all. _You'll die_ is an unremarkable omen, curt and crushing, something she already understood. "I've seen it happen to better than you. You let yourself out too deep; you can't take it back; you got nobody behind you. You'll choke."

"You'd love to think so," she said.

The Anarch was careful not to look at her. He flashed a sidelong, unhappy glance. "Not particular."

"Worry about your own response plan. And your own people, if you're still running blind patrols out south. Those territories are shared grounds. You can't risk setting a fire to the district, you can't afford the clean-up or the fallback, and I doubt you've done anything about establishing a permanent presence there."

_It was worth a shot._

Baron LA showcased a sigh. Turn signals flashed as they merged into an express lane. "If you say so."

"Didn't I just."

"Have it your way, senator. Always do." He had a bad attitude now. "But you know that, if they got hitmen on call all the way out in Chicago, there are more on the home front. A lot more. Bishops'll be expecting you, and if they're not already, they'll find out real soon."

"It's dangerous. I realize." But her comeback was a little thinner this time, a little more murmur and a little less superiority.

"I hope that's true, Woeburne. I truly hope it is. Because Sabbat don't play the game like the rest of us decent vampires—your people or mine. They're not friendly like me. You try to smack some shovelhead with a rulebook and all you're going to get is a shotgun rammed up your—"

"NINES," Woeburne shouted. Bottom teeth against top, neck muscles taut, her tongue smacked dryly against the roof of her mouth. A great big fault cracked through the marble company gloss. "Can you please—PLEASE. Just not _talk_ to me right now? Good _god_. You never do it. You never stop."

Nines stared at her, eyebrows raised—and, honestly pretty offended, went back to I-10 having shut his mouth.

Woeburne threw both shoulders against the seat and shimmied down, arms crossed, brooding. Her forehead leant moodily into the cool, condensating glass of car window. She couldn't find a place to relax her. So she lunged forward to switch on the radio, cranking channels, stopping when the speakers hit some ununique jazz boring enough to chase off the quiet. It felt like a standoff, so Rodriguez drove, ignoring her much as he dared, nobody speaking. Woeburne hunkered into her dejected, bumpy corner, badly wanting to be alone. She yanked her stupid hat over her eyes and stewed.

Thirty minutes passed like that before Nines happened to glance over and notice Woeburne was asleep. The Ventrue's face pressed deadweight against the window, smearing makeup onto glass. Hard as sympathy for such a person is, it's a very beat snake that curls up cold in the presence of somebody who hates her kind, and everybody knows what being that tired is like. That mean, no-sleep, I'll-shoot crease was still under her eye, but if you looked at it close, like you couldn't with those glasses in the way, it wasn't really all that threatening. It was just the way her face went.

There was no need to wake her, so he turned off the staticy backdrop of stereo. It stayed off until they pulled over, engine gargling, one block from Empire Arms. Red brick waited with spotlight eyes. He didn't like the frame of that building; it did not just sit, but observed. He sat there, too, looking at it a minute, not liking the sixth sense of something big inside.

London was still knocked out in the passenger seat. Rodriguez glanced up then down the street, scanned a parking lot ahead of him. It wasn't really safe, but the Anarch prioritized. He "prioritized," that is, which meant Nines spent a minute navigating carefully into the Ventrue's knapsack before disturbing her. Easy enough to slip a zipper from beneath one limp blueblooded arm. When Baron LA peered in, though, he saw only mundaneness: college-ruled notepad, cellular phone, laptop case, red fountain pens, canister of pepper spray. Standard fit. Innocence and drudgery and boredom. Not too much caring, not too much personality, not too-much-anything. Disappointing, but Rodriguez wasn't expecting much. He tugged the bag shut when her right hand twitched.

Just had to be sure. Sometimes you got to be. He heard a thunderclap menace off towards Santa Monica, smelled rain, and jiggled the passenger window's open/close switch to wake Woeburne.

She jolted up, snorting, swearing, disoriented.

"Look alive, senator. No pun intended."

She jackknifed alert in a heartbeat. The loud _tick-tink_ of cooling metal registered; Woeburne hustled to sleeve smudged lipstick and vampire spit off the glass before anyone noticed. She scrubbed at red eyes with the back of her hand. "—you people," was all he caught the edge of as Woeburne blearily tried to put some bite back on.

Nines got her out with a nod. There was a lot left unanswered, but there was also nothing else to say. Except, and not insincerely: "Try not to fuck this one up, London."

London showed him her middle finger and dropped bonelessly out of the truck. He watched her double-check the bag, angry and sleepish, then move around back to retrieve her luggage. He decided he disliked her a little less without those pretentious-as-shit reading glasses.

"Don't slam my door," was the Brujah's stand-in for goodbye.

Ms. Woeburne slammed it just about as hard as she could.

 _Happy New Year_ , she said, muffled beyond the glass, caught in the lights, and she went away.


	67. The Fool

_The Fool is the card of infinite possibility._

* * *

 

Knox Harrington was very, very, very-very-very very anxious.

You know that saying, "ants in your pants?" It's not perfect, but it's the first one he'd pick out to describe this to you. What it felt like. What it always feels like when you're what he is.

When you drink enough vampire blood—and enough is one full juice cup or a third of plastic bag—a human begins to feel something go wrong. Your guts start to burble, and your pores start to sting, and your kidneys can taste that wrongness you've put in them—except everything's right. The world gets really narrow-tight, and scary clear, and you feel like you could climb skyscrapers, run five miles in a minute. It makes your heart hammer and your mouth dry. Things start to blur in motion, too slow for your senses; they are easy to grab, easy to dodge, easy to birddog down. You hear of people doing insane shit like lifting up cars when they're in the shock of adrenaline high. Maybe part of this rightness has to do with adrenaline, but Knox isn't sure of the chemistry, and he doesn't especially care. It's a trade-off, like everything is, but it's not difficult to make. There's no rotting flesh or collapsing teeth or condemning scars. There's no liver transplant. It feels like bug wings buzzing inside your veins, making them cleaner, making you better, and the only payout is thinking about how to get more. It feels OK. It feels great.

Knox had paced the alleyway at least three-dozen times by now, sloshing through rain puddles and mowing down his fingernails. It was jittery in Santa Monica tonight. Or maybe he was the jittery one, looking at the wreckage around him. Scummy fenders, lost hubcaps, arrowheads of window glass. _Brother's Salvage_ was the name of the place. There were husks of old junkers framing the cramped side-street on its southern end, knocked-out headlights winking through the chain-link. Knox could see palm trees poking over gutted school buses, smell the ocean beyond all this gasoline. Storage silos peered over the barbed-wire fence. Penned dogs barked intermittently. Those voices, canine and tenacious, were upsetting to him. Rotts, probably, or German Boxers. They made him jump and rattle at every squirrel that ran by.

He wasn't sticking his pointy nose around there, though. No way. He wasn't about to end up hanging from a lamppost with intestine dangling out, like some kind of skinned rabbit, dog bites all over his arms. It was better to draw a safe distance line and keep to the other end of it. Bertram told him the warden of this place was a Gangrel butcher with a garage full of knives, dock rope, explosives, and no humanity to spare.

Bertram was supposed to meet him here—was supposed to meet him last week—and Knox's couldn't keep his hands from sweating. They sweated and sweated. This morning, he woke up in soggy bedsheets, wet palmprints on the pillow case, and he couldn't keep them dry. Ants in your pants, blood in your body. Withdrawal is always a bitch. Master liked to train him—"conditioning," he said—by weaning the ghoul, spreading out his feedings, toughening his spy for those hardscrabble nights when Tung burrowed deep underground. Disappeared for weeks, sometimes a month or more. Poof, no word. Knox just had to survive it and count, endlessly. Count fingers-and-toes, count minutes, and count on Bertram coming back.

Well, Knox knew how to count. He was smarter than he looked. He knew numbers, knew waiting games, and more than that, Knox knew people tended to underestimate him. Who wouldn't?—motor-mouth, skittish feet, flickering eyes. He didn't really mind. He used those things about himself. It made his life easier. If dupes think you're harmless, if they get all pissed and irked by you, they aren't expecting a sting.

So no. Nope. Knox didn't mind his work. It was fast-paced, intensive, and full of intrigue. It kept him on his toes. It was fun, really. Scary-fun. But fun.

Knox kind of hated Bertram, though. He hated turning around to see him. He'd pivot, spin, and there'd be that sickening, oozing, bulbous face, all its inhuman protrusions and open sores. He hated how it would materialize out of thin air, jaundiced claws on his shoulder, shadow darkening doorways in the witching hours of night. Funny, because he loved being a ghoul. Best time of his goddamn life, no question. But the stakes changed. You know? The stakes changed. Game changed. Your feet never landed on solid ground—would never land again. It was all right; it was, honestly. Knox didn't mind. Better the death you know. It was definitely preferable to see the monsters lurking around you than to jumble through them blindly, bare-assed, no care in the world. It was infinitely better to know.

The blood helped, of course. Blood was the fucking bomb! Man, he should've impressed some Toreador pin-up babe half this much. Oh, well. You get what you get and Knox got Bertram Tung. There were worse bosses to be had; that was obvious. A lot of ghouls would've thanked their lucky stars. You've got lucky stars—ya lucky bastard—to work for Santa Monica's kingpin Sewer-Rat. Jesus, did he have to be so fucking disgusting? Every time—EVERY TIME—made Knox want to puke—chugging plastic bottles of thick, lukewarm, clotty, oily color. It was like ants. It was like _nothing,_ like swallowing syrup laced with cocaine. He gulped them by twelves when business got dangerous. He still always expected to taste pus.

 _Bleh_.

Bertram was scary. Not fun-scary. Just scary— _oh shit_ , scary—terrified him. Knox just waited. That's what he did. He lived, waiting. Constantly, without relief, for the monster he knew to dissolve out of a dark corner. Bertram was in every hazy light shift, around every fender, under every bed. Sometimes Knox's hands would start shaking in their jacket pockets just thinking about it. His mouth would shrivel up, stomach banging, fear curling in the ghoul's ribs until it nauseated him. Couldn't sleep anymore. REM cycles were wishful thinking by this point in his supernatural career; he lurched up every few hours, jarred by a mattress squeak, or a nightmare, or a sink dripping, or a car horn, or a gunshot, or a fly smacking the beside lamp, or hail on the windows, midnight rain, or any number of sounds. Somebody's cat would jump from their windowpanes into a trashcan and he'd be up in half-a-heartbeat, snoring in his jeans, fumbling for the nightstand pistol. A ghoul never knew for sure what was creeping up on him. Bertram Tung, Bertram Tung's multitude of enemies, hunters, Santa Monica's murderer or that psycho Asian vampire. Does it, like, matter? Maybe he's just brushing against something vague, floaty. Clairvoyance, omniscience. Footsteps on your grave, yeah? Old stuff. Premature prickles of death.

Knox stuck a thumb in his mouth and chomped off a hangnail, eating it, no thinking. He took sixteen steps down the alley. He took sixteen steps back. He waited, worried, wondered, walked.

Some time passed. Knox wasn't sure exactly how much; kept checking his watch, a glance down, a bunched sleeve, no meaning taken from the numbers blinking there. No sign of Bertram yet. There were only occasional, noncommittal noises: squeaks, engine drone, muffler chokes. People were talking a few blocks off in all directions, and charcoal smells drifted up from the beach tunnels. Every so often, there'd be an unexpected _rush_ down the side-streets—rats hopping, chipmunks rooting, pigeons upending cardboard boxes for popcorn, breads and wilted lettuce. They were normal Santa Monica sounds. Noises, like he said. Not real sounds. Just noises—regular, people noises—you know what he means. Regular people; you know what that means.

But Knox was not regular people. The nerves went tangling up his vertebrae, behind his ear, tickling, making him swallow compulsively, grind his molars. The hand wedged between his large front teeth became the hand wrapped around a six-shooter. He pulled the gun out of its holster and flung its nozzle towards a particularly dodgy sound. When nothing happened—no gangs, no ogres, no vampires—Knox sucked in a breath, dropped his weapon arm, and sheathed it. He'd come ready to rumble. He always comes ready for something, but fuck, it's LA, you know what he means? Even in these burbs, out slumming the boonies, that's an understood fact. Smart way of life. Big city malice slow-burns out. You can't be too careful, no matter where you are. You've got to be careful just to be.

Zippers jangled on the ghoul's windbreaker as he reached into an inside pocket, fishing for tonight's prize. It was a small envelope packed full of labeled Polaroids. Most of them were routine. For him, _routine_ means snapping scenes from street corners, pulling out memory cards, or flipping through reels of hidden camera footage. The subject material varied as expected. Every week, Knox ran a surveillance rotation for Bertram, a combination of foot patrols, chatter, and photographs. He documented them as carefully as a quick-pass could. Notes and pictures were he had to show for it, and they were all here, sealed in waterproof ziplocks, arranged by street and time stamp. One more rifle through couldn't hurt. One more might keep him from missing something—and it must have been the nine-dozenth pass, not that he'd counted—or, at least, he hadn't counted with that impatient kind of tone.

They were all in-place. A blow-by montage of the town as she'd been today: Brother's Salvage; Surfside Diner; Santa Monica Pier, crippled and currently under police shutdown. A beachfront congregation of thin-bloods; a pawnshop operation; some wise-cracking Cam New Yorker who lived in a ritzy condo and smoked two packs of Camels per day. There were several shots of the Voerman place taken from neighboring windows. The ghoul captioned all the images he'd taken of known blood bank patrons (having paid off Vandal Cleaver for the hospital security footage, like, ages ago). He had a blurry candid shot of two Sabbat footmen sniffing around the nearby parking garage. He had captured someone else's stooge studying locks outside that stuffed-up studio, _Gallery Noir_.

Bonus: he also had three uncropped freeze-frames of S.M. Woeburne standing outside LAX.

The first image was unassuming. Disgruntled Ventrue, lost-looking, irritable, genderless expression on a dead female face. She grabbed her satchel strap and looked far down the open sidewalk. The second seemed excessive: she stopped, sharp chin and round cheek, to eyeball a taxi cab. The third told no real tales. Militant and well-dressed, grimacing, the wind making her ducts water, a smudge of dark lipstick at one corner of an unsmiling mouth. That could have probably been the last one if Knox hadn't noticed it. But, because Knox noticed everything, and because he always followed-up, so too had the ghoul noticed stolen plates outside that airport an hour before Ms. Woeburne ever arrived.

The Baron was in an unassuming Dodge parked some distance down the strip. He pulled away, left, came back a few times, found a spot that seemed better or safer or less obvious. He scratched the side of his face. He got out of the car to make an unhappy-sounding call. He was nervous about who-knows-what, and the Brujah kept glancing back-and-forth, like he'd miss something important, like a bad feeling itched inside an Anarch's gut. Nines Rodriguez was an uneasy sort of impatient. Knox had pictures of that, too.

And he had the pictures you would assume the first sets implied. With Ventrue and Brujah, it's either going to be guns or roses, and it's never roses. That night, it was a spike of aggression in an already aggressive Camarilla face; it was a fast argument; it was a collar in a fist. His final shot was the pièce de résistance. She turned her head in one last indecision—allowing him a decipherable shot of her face—and of the five clean, clipped fingers on the door handle.

Knox didn't know Ms. Woeburne. Hers was a name on paper. He didn't have a grudge or anything, is what he means to say. But your Domitor's business isn't open for debate; if Boss ordered him to gather information, then you know what he's going to do. He'll sniff it out on anything or anyone. Having almost royally blown it with Lily a few months ago was a decisive stab at his confidence. Nosferatu don't understand being sloppy. Whatever his master wants, for whatever reasons, whoever dies—it's all the same to a fearful, clumsy, bloodhound ghoul.

The kid took a breath, mussed through his prickly hair, and gnawed all the cuticles off his left hand before he walked around a city garbage can and into Bertram Tung.

It was instant—instinct. Knox's mouth dropped and his body skidded backwards, lungs pumping up a scream before his yellow eyes could widen, cognate. The vampire gave him a friendly close-fisted sock to the solar plexus to quiet that shit. It hurt. It caught the sound in his throat and dissolved it, leaving him swollen, tubes lurching for oxygen. He gaped like a goldfish in a little park pond. He doubled over, clutching his abdomen. Bertram laughed and gave the poor wired-up son-of-a-bitch a minute to compose himself.

"Oh, suck it up, man. Grow a pair and maybe I won't have to slug you anymore."

Knox had to spit a few times to clear his throat. The saliva bubbled on worn asphalt. He was bowed over, palm heels gripping his kneecaps, and forced a junkie's smile for the Nosferatu—a pathetic, off-kilter, wheeze of a smile. But the ghoul's eyes revealed his suffering. His grin tasted terrible and it made the wrinkles around Knox's mouth echo that sucker-punch pain.

Tung sucked air just to snort it out. Pinched sinuses stiffened the nasal voice that wandered down them. _Oh, Jesus,_ he thought, and you could see mean, pitying laughter there, inside the irises, through the capillaries around them, making vermeil lines through tight slits. The kid was useful, the Nosferatu supposed. "Useful," sure.

He was also, of course, a sniveling bitch. Like, Knox realized that about himself. It was to be expected, though; it's part of addiction; it's not something to fight over, and not a thing that can be helped. Bertram Tung wasn't some Ventrue dabbing his mouth with a napkin, dolling out strategic charity alongside his executions. He didn't hate his pawns because they were less powerful, or because they make him cluck his tongue and think _Jesus, Jesus Christ_. Shit, Bertram even once went so far as to say he sort of liked Knox Harrington, mile-a-minute screwball that he was. Bertram could appreciate his kind of consistency. And he appreciated how his minion annoyed the piss out of every big-britches neonate who meandered, unasked, into this Domain. It's a virtue, seriously—being able to irritate fuck-ups into spilling their beans, taking a shot, shuffling someplace else.

Yeah, sure: Betram liked his ghoul. Liked him better than most of the other's he'd made, anyway. But all the same, Bertram knew full well boyo's time was running out; you could see it in the way he'd tsk-tsk. Bummer. Couldn't be stopped. Like he was fated for a nasty end, no matter how smart, fast-talking, or just OK he was. Like ghouls always are.

Granted, Bertram probably wasn't going to shed actual tears over Knox fucking Harrington.

"Stop dying all over the place and listen for a second, willya? I've got a shit busy night waiting for me. Appointment with somebody's fledgling pinhead, starts in twenty. Always got lots and lots of appointments. Then I've got some other thing I'm not about to be late for. Call it a visitation." (He didn't specify with whom. But he sort of looked down the street heading toward Jeanette Voerman's place.)

"It's all there," Knox squeaked, still stinging, wiping the rest of his spit on a coat sleeve. It glistened on the windbreaker and made a wet spot in dark, depressing blue. "Everything I said there was. Right where you wanted it to be. All in one piece, just like you told me."

"That's more like it." Tung felt a little more generous when the ghoul pulled himself together, getting a hold on all that breathy human breath. He took the proffered envelope. He took it, just like that, and the Nosferatu's barbed, flaking, squint-eyed voice made his ghoul cringe into his stupid old coat lapels. "You catch what I asked you, bub?"

Those eyes—carnivorous, eyes like red pin-lights set in a skull ravaged by some ancient strand of disease. Elephantitis, he thought; whatsitcalled. Knox watched the crude, ugly nose ring shiver as Master talked. The big growths across his crown were blistering again; one, the worst, he'd bandaged, shabby cotton going damp, souring a putrid mucous-green. Pink skin peeled away from dead tissue. Infection, a strangely human stench. It clung to his dusty jacket shoulders and rumpled leather sleeves. God, he stank. Knox nodded—just _yes_ , that's all—and felt his body retreating, moving, taking one-two-three steps back.

Bertram gave him a snaggle-toothed, plaquey smile.

"Good work, ghoul," Master said, flipped through several snapshots, and stuffed them into his pocket. Satisfied, he removed an innocent-looking thermos and tossed it. Anxious fingers caught and clenched. They shook. "You earned your keep this round."

It was a lukewarm thanks, but Knox didn't care. He caught the can and uncapped it, guzzling blood like juice, like something that comes in a carton, clean and cold. Five swigs. He drained the whole thing.

He came up panting, grateful, red-mouthed.

Bertram Tung was gone.


	68. Infanta

Every Childe has asked this. Every single one.

When Ms. Woeburne stepped into Venture's penthouse, pumps clacking the marble a bit like bones, she had clearly meant to be straight-faced. The woman's mouth was a small, flat box; her shoulders were square; severe eyebrows, tugged inward, expressed little. Sebastian did not know what she was wearing. Something dour and layered. He could not claim an honest interest in these milk-and-water details of progenies . Indeed, though, from behind the mask of a laptop, fingers tapping and blues all bland, the Prince was curious to see how Ms. Woeburne had done.

She had not meant to do it. She strode into that room with every intention of deadpan, diffident calm. But having returned, the poor soldier apparently could not help it.

She smiled.

It was a tentative, hopeful, lopsided gesture—and one quickly extinguished when he did not even glance up. Ms. Woeburne sobered immediately, blimp punctured, attentions shifting to the overstuffed manilla folder hugged beneath one arm. Her small, neat teeth opened only to close again. She fidgeted. She listened to the aggressive _tip-tip_ of keys. She looked desperate for him to say something.

Prince Los Angeles decided to show a little clemency for a thing that was his, and humored her.

"I heard from Beckett," was Mr. LaCroix's idea of a greeting. Ms. Woeburne blinked at him like she'd stepped into a minefield and heard a pin go _tink_. Seconds passed and she did not know where to put her feet next. "He expects to arrive within the next few months. You made an impression, I understand."

Silence gave her the space to calculate a safe response. He knew she would not speak without rehearsing the words in her head. Sebastian also knew that, from their current positions, she could only watch him type, and did so timidly. This broadcasting of weakness irked him. Prince LaCroix scooted the computer screen, blocking Ms. Woeburne from view, until only a glimpse of that short, disappointing brunette and her right sleeve were visible. There was a single crease in the dark suit fabric. He eyed it with irritation and, always, a recognition of inevitability. This was the lopsided truth of the times.

"I'm sorry for taking so long, sir," she offered. It was less an admission of guilt and more of a plea for grace. Ms. Woeburne was sounding out her standing with him, toeing thin ice before taking a plunge. Not unwise. Good Ventrue sense. Good, timeless Ventrue sense: smart phrases, economical terms, decent diplomacy, reasonable tact. She'd cement Aedile status soon. Confidence, however, is a privilege earned only by Elders, and the Ms. Woeburnes of the world oughtn't cling to birthright.

Sebastian LaCroix knows the way of it—knows that birthright and blood kin mean nothing in the swelter of fire, with rifle nozzles pressing into breast flesh. This unforgiving West is built of more tangible stuffing than great-great-grandfathers and the cells that blanket a womb. His Los Angeles is a natural selection city in a brutally free place. It meritocracy: status won, talents proven. That is a lesson men like him meted out—a school and a paradigm that his generation declared fit for the rest of civilized life.

The Prince did not hint. His face was unreadable, unscuffed stone.

"Loose ends," he asked without asking at all.

"Yes. Yes, there were," she told him, and continued from there, much as she tended to: Point A, Point B, Point C. Briefings and debriefings defined her, filled up the tacklebox of her adopted role. "I'm afraid so. There shouldn't have been—I took every precaution— _but_. Naturally, not enough. Never enough. That's our business. That would be Murphy's Law."

They had asked him in Johannesburg. They had asked him in Pretoria. They had asked him in the despair of a late London winter, watching a sad, smothering March snow, penning forms for Harpies, chewing on their cheek.

He waited. Ms. Woeburne could not. Her lips stiffened, cringing around the mandible; it is the tightness of one classic human expression. It is a corkscrew that means frustration—a face that disallowed pain, wit, or contempt.

"There was a Sabbat situation. It gave me some trouble. We—that is to say, an Officer Benjamin and I—had a bit of trouble identifying the source, and in pinpointing its location. There were vagaries. Delays. It held me. But I've taken care of it." A palm whapped the collection of files, her meager peace offering. Ms. Woeburne took eight cautious steps forward and set it upon the farthest corner of desk. She handled the presentation like a pharaoh might a sacrifice, small killings meant to appease vindictive cat-gods. "Here are the full reports, some information extracted from one of their dens, and a summary I compiled for you, ex post facto."

LaCroix looked at the folio; he did not look at her.

"I see," was said, and the Prince crossed a leg over his knee, idly flipping through. She had no comment. Fifteen minutes dragged by like this. Paper rumpled quietly with each page he turned. The grandfather clock upon his fireplace mantle ticked like a metronome, judgmental and punitive. Unlit candelabras frowned silver frowns. Ms. Woeburne stood there awkwardly—wringing both hands, feet stinging in their slingbacks—because he did not bid her to sit down.

She was so typical.

So, five or six years ago, when the child asked him that uncomfortable question— _"Why me?"—_ it came as no surprise.

He is not a man much concerned with personal details. He is not a man for being personal, and so Sebastian has cataloged very little of this, feels no sentimental proclivity to dog-ear unimportant memories away. Prince Los Angeles does not indulge in hindsight, and thinks rarely on the circumstances that brought Childer into his agendas. On whatever routine, ordinary day Mr. LaCroix first encountered Ms. Woeburne, her potential for service had immediately been apparent—a clean, empty space where a badge would sit nicely, a lapel through which a corporal's pin might be secured. He disliked gambling on unlikely prospects, and did not have time to waste second-guessing soldiers. Sebastian was not a worrier.

So, certainly—when he had picked this new warden to keep his vaults, answer his door, hold his keys—there was no doubt that here was a very responsive and conscientious person. She was tidy in the brass-snap way of petty officers, unsmiling, and wrote with a no-flourish speed. Her forehead had dented prematurely, the mark of a critical thinker who'd battened too many ideas beneath authority reverence. She came in a brown-box package. Had the woman not also come with such a flimsy-ankle fear—had she not been the result of such a sedentary ambition, so many underpinnings of self-doubt—LaCroix imagined she might've made a respectable public speaker on her own. You could infer this about his stiff-backed bailiff. She was grave in appearance and curt in disposition. She thought things through, never blindly sauntered in. She always preambled with a polite overture. Diligence, appropriate intellect, stable mediocrity, a firm sense of one's place in the rank-and-file. They are traits the Camarilla requires in its servants. The immediate fact that occurred to this Camarilla Prince, however, was how much she resembled Chancey Brown.

Miss Brown had entered his employ unexpectedly; her involvement in the mechanisms of those olden years had been brusque, sudden, and brought about by a lingering impression of usefulness. Unlike Ms. Woeburne and her snug, unruffled diligence, Brown had not been a likely candidate. She had not been an agent, encultured, or altogether educated. She had originally been a Southampton prostitute. He had been a conniving intelligencer of the Third Coalition, demeanor sharp and unfriendly as the stitchings that bit his jaw.

Ms. Woeburne fidgeted; her mouth pressed more tightly, more grievously, as she watched him inspect the documents for another moment. She couldn't bear it. The explanations that followed were not terribly helpful, but she badly needed to say _something_ , anything, to retain her composure, and so: "It seems there's been some disturbing correspondence between downtown's Hallowbrook pack and those in Chicago. I noticed a—"

"I can read what it says," the Prince informed her, crisp but neutral, and turned over a blueprint.

The Foreman stared. Monochrome professionalism; dumb, deaf deflation. He could see her struggling to catch up, scrabbling for a note of interest, a figure or a byline that would appease him.

Chancey had been a bit cleverer than her latest successor, two centuries apart; that much needn't be debated. Ms. Woeburne was certainly better-schooled, a product of contemporary necessity as opposed to fortunate breeding. She had a smart file cabinet of corporate lingo and five-syllable flattery at her disposal, and she used them whenever higher-ups needed impressing. He could see her groping for them now. Telling, then, how much more articulate the child's predecessor had been. Miss Brown's talent for storytelling proved to be one of her finest assets. It is a Ventrue's prerogative to master their deceit. His earliest corporal had not been a Ventrue, but her panache for falsehood had been—to a military captain and, eventually, a benefactor—more valuable than thick fur in Russian winters. She had a sly tongue and pistol mind and an undefined hunger for more than she had.

In the todays of capitalism—in neoliberalism and metropolitan progress—there is nothing more a patron can ask of his spies. Ms. Woeburne was not exactly a spy, but though her slyness faltered beneath her status as a pawn, that aggressive desire to _mean something_ was there.

Sebastian took an inordinate amount of time with her portfolio, perusing at his leisure. When he had finally finished, one pale hand picked up the whole stack and dropped it theatrically onto rich mahogany. He did not indulge the agent with eye contact. The Prince leant back against Italian leather, then, chair creaking, with all his fingers folded atop a kneecap. Monitor glow blurred until all color—blond, blue, ivory—was lost in a wash of tomblike white. He was exigent. He stared thoughtfully at the matters before him without regard for the bone-and-blood body who brought it in.

"This is somewhat disconcerting, Ms. Woeburne." His preemptive apology increased her anxiety. "Don't mistake me. I don't mean to undermine your abilities—your very substantial abilities. But I must ask: how, exactly, did _you_ recover this?"

Ms. Woeburne took his question literally. Of course she did. He was unsure if her bent for fundamentalism and autocracy were happy accidents or ignorance—deliberate ignorance—the misunderstandings that seek to dodge, manipulate, and self-protect. "Well, the whole knot was rather close to home, to be frank. It sort of fell on me that way, and all there was to do was follow it. And I do mean that plainly. Shortly after I met with Mr. Beckett, a foot patrol intercepted us. We were just outside my residence. Drake Hotel. We'd only just left—business—and we—"

The summary went down in a gulp when LaCroix drew a loud breath. Ms. Woeburne had been anticipating his interruption. It mollified Sebastian somewhat that she'd seen this coming. Perhaps she was more perceptive than he sometimes assumed.

"Yes, that's what your report says." The Prince felt an eyebrow lift. It was a small indication of displeasure, but it rattled his legatee. "It's not what I meant. This data is thorough, of course. But, if it's all the same, I'd like to hear your story from teeth to tongue, between you and I directly. I think you understand."

The molars pushed together inside that mouth, and there was a faint line change around Ms. Woeburne's nostrils. Yes, the logistics were solid, the missives genuine—but the background was clumsy. She understood the improbability of her account, of a living-room diplomat obtaining such information, and reflected carefully, though it hardly mattered; he could not disprove anything. Beckett had fit his arrogant reputation by being irritatingly vague on the telephone. Still, the corporal saw her commander's doubt, and given their recent history, sought out a hurtle to leap for him. She could not afford his suspicions now. She certainly could not afford to be caught in a lie. It was imperative to use Chicago to demonstrate her merit. It was critical she groom and maintain esteem.

Ms. Woeburne had been disappointed all those years ago when she'd discovered that—all these proper, practical attributes aside—his deciding factor in inheriting her had come down to looking, moving, and sounding a bit like some centuries-dead old sting.

"Hasn't Beckett told you, sir?" she asked, a feeble grin through the vise of her nerves. It was an attempt to exhibit modesty. It was also an attempt to avoid a wrong answer.

You ought not to deny credit where credit is due. Though Sebastian would never disclose it for fear of spoiling her, Ms. Woeburne had exceeded his expectations in certain ways—certain on-paper, clerical, clean-fingers ways. That said, he rarely held high hopes for fledglings, hoping only a small margin more for his own. But—with pessimism in mind—she had subsisted against several cities, and against some plans to obliterate her. Ms. Woeburne was mature for a Foreman despite the baby fat of domesticity. She was trustworthy, if not fully honest. She was dependable, albeit not worshipful. She was a police chief displaced from her spotless office into a bubbling, disorderly Domain. She would follow it through, at least, until you put your fingers to your lips and whistled her back to the house.

A dog can become dangerous when left on its own. Ms. Woeburne is the kind of humble, pedigree pointer that sees a pheasant flap but will not give chase until bidden. This is because Sebastian LaCroix learned his lesson about over-blooding your royal guard many decades ago. He never allows a hunting hound too much clearance, gives them only so many teeth. There is always a bigger piece of meat to be eaten. There is rarely a dog that can strip its collar off.

A Prince will have enemies, internal and external, people who seek to supplant him. This is the way of good competition. It is a little like rifling: ready, aim, _bang_! Advance-lunge, a routine with a bayonet. You will stand still with weapon against your chest to shoot the wolves. They attack from ignorance; they do not know you, not from far afield their bellies in the tall grass, and so overestimate their size. They think themselves larger, meaner, smarter. There is not so much to differentiate these disloyal beasts from a good birder—and, indeed, sometimes you will find your own creature has smelled the dead goose, forgotten its civility, latched its fangs around your arm. This is what happens when you praise your servants, let them prance and pout like pets. This is what happens when you feed too richly or not enough.

Sebastian LaCroix was a little hunter once himself. He has scented and tracked and pointed plenty of game, and so he knows a dog that is truly loyal is not so from love, but from respect, the oldest gender of it. It has seen your guns in the shed. It has heard them oiled, breathed the powder, carried their iron in its mouth—and so it knows to wait, to heel, to fear.

Sebastian LaCroix knows what runs through his own blood. He still relishes the sight of his Sire's face recognizing betrayal—the pompous, talentless lord caught in a last stupefied surprise before falling to ash. Caught in its own dog's teeth. It was his blood only after that.

He would not be surprised should it take but one generation to turn upon him. She is still _his_ Childe. He could trust her with every piece of paper, and never trust her that much.

"Beckett told me only enough as to compliment your deft response," LaCroix clarified. _Twisted, meandering old wolverine._ "According to him, you rushed right off after the assailant. Claimed he tried to stop you, but you'd have none of it. I was sure to mention how tenacious you tend to be. Even so, running down Sabbat footmen in the streets doesn't sound like my Ms. Woeburne, if you don't mind my candor."

His Ms. Woeburne flustered. Her weak smile began to splinter at its seams. Her fists, ever so slightly, balled and released. "Ah," she said.

The telephone rang. He ignored it.

Vague incongruity. That would be her downfall. Her teeth were white, but too small. Her handshake crunched, but the arm above it trembled. Her facial features were decently formed: prominent eyebrows, clean verticals, not waifish; clear eyes; conservative nose. She was very symmetrical. She was standard issue. Yet there was something mildly sickly about her just-above-averageness—something brought about by fatigue and pollution—that preexisted Embrace. Cosmetics made it worse. Sometimes it is hard to see the details that helped him decide this child would be worth the effort her creation required.

Such things couldn't be helped. Ms. Woeburne lacked, but she did so plainly, with no fancy dressing.

"I suppose we all get lucky from time to time," Ms. Woeburne managed. She even sounded a bit like Chancey, shrill English prickling into fast, protective laughter. Still, she lacked context that might make her into more.

Prince LaCroix frowned. "I suppose," he said only, and returned to his work.

She winced like she wanted to run.

And there you have it. A shame, because in fact—during those rare moments she was not fussing papers or chomping her inner cheek—Sebastian thought his descendent looked intelligent. It was a shame the child could not find a way to balance what handsomeness she had with her precious severity. It was a shame she was not apt at harmonizing. It was a shame how much easier it seemed to chop off all your hair and wear dismal suits than achieve authority through natural means. She was always attempting to compensate for her soft spots with artificial intimidation tactics. That is the tragic thing about women, though, and why they so rarely make exemplary commanders.

Corporals are a different matter entirely.

"Beckett exaggerates, mind you," she promised, shoe tip thumping. Having bitten her mouth to satisfaction, the child did what comes readily to court aides. Talking seemed to comfort her. It released pent air from dead lungs like unplugging a bathtub. "It wasn't nearly as heroic as all that. It was action-reaction. Really, I only did what I…" She edits herself. "I did whatever I could."

"Yes," he agreed. Prince Los Angeles's thumb hovered over the spacebar. "You've made the habit of being versatile."

There was no looking at her—no need to lecture recruit who'd heard little else from him since her ugly mistake. You could see thoughts rushing behind those restless eyes, the kind of nerves flight animals have when the wind makes rustling sounds. She felt like a disappointing child, forcing this uncomfortable truce with a parent who disliked her. And the _typing_. Each key punched down like a gunshot. The sound of them drove her anxiety higher than it should have been. Ms. Woebune shifted; her ankles started to complain. She'd clearly begun to wonder if there would ever be any looking at her again at all.

He showed his card.

"I imagine the Anarch Party will confirm your account."

Prince LaCroix—though he was not always _Prince_ , but just LaCroix—had fostered three other corporals between Chancey Brown and this grim-faced girl. They had all been fruitful to some degree; each served a function he'd mapped out. His Childer lived quiet, intensive, backdrop lives; his gift to them was security without the political inconvenience of spotlight attention. They managed his estates and ferried his missives, kept his books and locked his secrets. When their services grew obsolete, there were always candidates queued up to replace them. Sebastian never enlisted orphans as his protégés—never hired upcoming Camarilla bureaucrats who'd carved names for themselves amidst the anonymity. Only fresh pups will do. Minds mired in Kindred suspicion, illicit alliances, and history are of more harm than help. From impressionableness and vulnerability rises the truest devotion, the most immortal respect.

Ms. Woeburne had been a classic model. She was understated, relentless, and intensely private. She lived alone—no pets—not even a miserable tiger barb or hedgehog. She was formally educated a stone's throw beyond her pay grade. She was barely noticeable, really. The woman had a personality like a stronghold that can hold out. What was more: this fourth Childe of his lacked more than presence. She lacked the friends, family, and community that make Embraces bitter. No roommates or fiancés. No live-in grandmother or family house in Maryland. No one in the New York branch knew anything about her beyond name and face. She told him of no one and nothing from her past in weepy terms or with disdain. It had all been compartmentalized, boxed, sealed, stored, placed somewhere removed from her reality. Converting her had been as simple as delegating a purpose deserving of a tin soldier's best efforts.

Much as any guardian or taskmaster hates to admit it, though: Ms. Woeburne was getting older, and the time had come to find something real to do with the child. Already was the baby down sloughing off as her shoulder fought to wedge its place in a Los Angeles line. She tilted her chin at a distasteful, alpha angle; she still heeled well; but she stood with full awareness of the Ventrue behind her.

Except she was slack-jawed now, curved teeth around a limp tongue.

"I didn't—"

The Prince shut her up with a well-placed _ahem_. "You most undeniably did," he said, emotion nonexistent, and had just reached for a photograph bundle in his desk drawer when Ms. Woeburne stepped up.

She approached his desk in a fashion somewhere between a march and a stumble. One stiletto loudly misstepped. Sebastian flinched at the squeak. Her expression was all insistence and unbridled vigor; her stare, sage leaves encircled by white; her palms, walled as though to say halt. Fortunate that Mr. LaCroix had dismissed the Sheriff prior to meeting Ms. Woeburne tonight.

" _No_ —" She almost shouted. "That's not it. I'm sorry, but that's just not—it's not it. It's not it at all. You're mistaking me, and I—Please let me speak." Ms. Woeburne beseeched him like any good knight accused of treachery. A needless display; the Prince made no move to interrupt. He thought she might be on a knee in another minute. Her voice was thick and woody, defensive, scared indignation. Inappropriate audience for acted passions. On the unseemly side.

"What I meant was," Woeburne squawked. She took a useless breath.

"Sir," the Foreman said a minute later, steeling. Joints, closed; lackluster enamel gritted; all those loose ends scraped together. She centered every faculty on looking callous. She sounded like a woman trying not to cry. "What I did. It was a necessity. It was a tactical choice, and not one I charged into. Not without preparing. Not without care. You will see all of this in my reports. The immediacy—the situation required a direct response. Communication. Communication, sir," she told him, "because from where I was, I had nothing else. I warned the principle target, which was clear, as soon as possible. Not warned. Alerted. I alerted them—Downtown, that is—of potential Sabbat activity in their sector, aimed at them or blamed on them. I told them no specifics. They were barely more than _rumors_ at that point, sir. I made it plain that once I verified my sources, you'd be the first to know. I didn't want to waste your time chasing down a plant. I had to be _sure_. You had to be sure. And this all had to be contained. Quietly—as quietly as possible until the details could be gathered. This was a mutual understanding between us. Between our party and them. I had no idea he'd…" The latest Free-State audacity didn't quite make it up Woeburne's throat before she lost her nerve. She swallowed once and once again. If this graceless child was about to be sick in his office, Sebastian would lose all his remaining patience.

But the Foreman was still trying to right herself, which marginally regained her stature in his eyes. "Surely you don't think I'd be so—so stupid—as to keep that. Not after what's happened." That nuisance of a bottom lip, troubling her all evening, was now trapped by teeth. Her arms snapped righteously to her ribs. Her knuckles clenched. "What I'm trying to say is that if I'd had any thoughts they'd intercept me, I'd have taken measures to—"

"But I approve," the Prince said, held _ctrl-alt-delete_ , and pressed on.

If there was anything left his dubious corporal would've never expected from her master, this was it. She dropped cold. Ms. Woeburne stared at him with a sort of speechlessness, wary, not quite convinced of her safety, wondering when this spark of support would convert into a fireball and blast her into a glade.

LaCroix sighed, and elaborated.

"The incident this past summer was very sloppy, Ms. Woeburne," he reminded her. Ms. Woeburne cemented her heels in place, preparing for castigation. Imagine the surprise when: "You show prudence in following it up with gestures of Camarilla sincerity. And you have done this without our enemies truly gaining on us. I read your reports to my satisfaction; I assume they are accurate. Your trade has only advanced the troubles between two very large annoyances to me, and in a way that is cohesive for future planning. As I think you know, surprises—even convenient ones—are never preferable to planning when one is playing Jyhad. So." A cluck of the Prince's tongue. "The locals owe you twice now, and I am in an excellent position to use that debt to our benefit. Particularly in regards to controlling the Sabbat."

"And I have intel on an Anarch strike in Compton," was all she could say on her behalf. The child looked flattened to her every stitch. That usually disciplinarian stare flickered longingly at an empty chair Mr. LaCroix did not offer her. "And I—well. Yes. I figured…"

No more. She'd exhausted what she had.

"You did a very foolish thing all those months ago, Ms. Woeburne," was his assessment. "You did not do a treasonous thing. I trust your dedication, if not your experience." He took a thoughtful pause. "I admit that I doubted you after the botched Nagaraja affair. I do not apologize for these reservations, but I am willing to reinstate my confidence, provided you are useful to my court here. There is, after all, a difference between a mistake and incompetence. I think you know this. I also think you should know that I want to _manage_ you because you are young; it's not my aim to hold your hand in every foray until the end of my days. That you are able to enact sound decisions without an overseer confirming your every supposition is encouraging. I take it as evidence you have not entirely put my tutelage to waste."

Ms. Woeburne did not trust it. She waited. She said _yes, well._

"You showed discretion and fine judgment in Chicago," the Prince granted. It was as much of a congratulations as a soldier could hope to get. "Stay that course."

"Thank you" was really all she could give in return.

"Now," he announced, clapping his palms together, still fixed on the laptop. Ms. Woeburne could not avoid the déjà vu. "On to business. I spoke with Ms. Mira about an hour ago. The Giovanni have secured our bargain and will hold the artifact until we pick it up. There was a bit of a setback during transport—nautical issues; nothing you need worry yourself over, I'm sure—but all seems to be contained. The arrangements were finalized in your absence. Whenever you're ready, I'd like for you to retrieve it."

Ms. Woeburne inferred that "whenever you're ready" is not an invitation. "Of course. Should I—?"

"Normally I would outfit you with a personal guard, but I'm afraid the sensitive nature of our deal requires that you go alone." Mr. LaCroix had answered her question before she could ask it. "This matter remains between you and I, yes?"

"I understand," she said, and he saw no reason not to believe her.

"The Giovanni are being very cooperative, and I expect they will streamline this process for you. When you've acquired the piece, please bring it directly to me. I will send my Sheriff to assist you in hauling it up."

"You want me to bring it here, to your office?" The Foreman's worried brows ascended.

"That _is_ what I said."

Ms. Woeburne tallied the details; her compliance comes with a nod. "All right," she pledged—hoping, perhaps, that it might win her a moment's notice. It did not. The Prince's hands flung themselves across rows of square black keys. "I'll take care of it tonight. As soon as I leave you."

"That would be appreciated. Afterwards, we'll need to talk at greater length about your exchange with the Party, and how best to manipulate it to our advantage. I have a thirty-minute opening in three hours. For your convenience, you may stop by then, assuming you've attended to the sarcophagus."

Another nod. There was a general aura of prostration about Ms. Woeburne that his sparse compliments could not dissolve; her humility was a feint, an attempt to secure herself an exit, scot-free. "I will, Mr. LaCroix."

"Very well, then." He blinked. "Good work and goodbye."

Ms. Woeburne stepped away, gave a painfully clumsy curtsey/bow/bob that she was relieved he probably hadn't seen, and made to escape. The Foreman didn't look back. She wouldn't have dared, not for a small fortune, not given the atmosphere of this homecoming. Her gait was swift, anesthetized, and stung by his insouciance. Her stare was fixed on the door like a racing greyhound on a motor.

"Ms. Woeburne," the Prince called. She froze.

"Sir." The soldier did not flinch. If a lion leapt around that desk and landed flat upon the Ventrue's back, ripping into sinew, the impact would not have astonished her whatsoever.

"I'd also like you here no later than eight o'clock tomorrow night, upon which occasion we will discuss what will be required of you as my Seneschal. Is this clear?"

"Yes, sir," the good corporal said, hands at her sides. She could was not nearly gauche enough to twist around now.

He dismissed—"Then I will see you soon."—and a tin soldier was gone, an echo of diplomat in her place, a shotgun finality in the way his door closed.

Sebastian closed his computer. Now the bell of the tower lift; it saluted, sealed, descended seven stories and passed through his realm of hearing. But the Prince imagined it would sink all the way to level one, whereupon it would stop, unlock, and open. His Childe would click across the spotless floor, through the egress and into a taxi bound for the Giovanni estate. And, given his allegiances were still solid, she'd be back in three hours with a promise for this Domain.

In so many ways her predecessors would have done it better, said it with more conviction. But sang-froid and stiff-upper-lip are fitting surrogates, and Sebastian LaCroix would have to make do with Ms. Woeburne.


	69. Re: Doomsaid

**TO: ROZALIN GREENE**   
**FROM: CLAUDIA FAIRHOLM**   
**DATE: JANUARY 1 2011 9:16 PM**   
**SUBJECT: RE: THE MAYANS SAY WE’VE GOT ONE MORE YEAR…**

Oh, fuck the Mayans, my love! Incidentally.

You’ve got prophecy on the mind, I see—too much of it to make poor Alistair’s little rooftop shindig last night! We missed you terribly, or at least I did. I poured a whole two bottles of bubbly over the banister for us, may we ever rest in pieces. Friends ‘til the gristly end, my Rozalin, whether you show up to parties or not.

I do hope you come next time Alistair throws a soiree, though. As riveting as our dear Dr. Grout and friends can be, that house gives me all the heebie-jeebies in the worst possible way. He did an honest-to-goodness swell job of decorating, however, I must hand it to the old bean. Did my people miss out on an artiste-in-PhD’s clothing? He hung white finger lights on the garden chairs, Roz! Lace tablecloths! It was downright romantic.

Who knew Alistair had it in him? For the next get-together, maybe I’ll suggest a _Pride and Prejudice_ theme.

Moonlit shebangs aside, I hope you lived up midnight in your own way, you lousy homebody.

No matter what wild antics you got up to in your pjs, you had a better New Year’s Eve than Therese Voerman did, I’ll tell you that. Roman Q—you remember my friend Romanique, don’t you? Chubby-cute linebacker with the yacht fetish?—told me just last night that the Voermans lost another prime piece of real estate. Not to ghosts or surf this time, but Sabbat. Apparently, Little Miss Mira (hate her already!) sent an appraiser out to talk numbers on Bergamot Station, and he never showed up. Or came back. Of course, Therese won’t fess up to it, but we all know that dingy burb of hers is crawling. I look forward to watching her try to lie it off to LaCroix at next week’s summit. Oh, yes, I’m kicking off 2011 with some early schadenfreude, I admit. I own up to it!

To be one-hundred-percent with you, Roz, this pickup in activity is worrying me. I know you have your own suite of problems downtown, but things are antsy in my neighborhood. Hollywood has us flustering enough about hunters. Sabbat bopping around my poor Hollyhock House putting fingerprints on everything is the last thing I need.

Of course, our strapping Prince responds with a townhall. Parfait.

I don’t know what his ickle Seneschal is saying at those things, and oh, _oh_ I don’t care. She ought to be off filing something. I refuse to believe he didn’t have anyone more appropriate for that job.

Speaking of not caring, I ran into Max last week. (SURPRISE, SURPRISE; _what_ a coincidence.) He was a bit short on time and, after the usual invitations to call if I receive any Princely overtures, murmured cryptically about LaCroix’s little—ahem— _Antiquities Department_ having acquired something of “incomparable theurgical weight.” Hmph. Unless it’s the world’s largest sailboat, I want nothing more to do with it. I’m sick to death of hearing from the both of them, pestering us all on account of some toys dug up from the sand.

Maybe someone ought to throw them a garden party. (Won’t be me.)

But that’s a problem for another Toreador, natch.

In the undead words of Aleister Crowley: May the New Year bring us courage to break our resolutions early! To swearing off virtues of every kind, my auldest of lang syne. Happy twenty one-one.

 

Claudia

P.S. Who gives a hoot what the Mayans say? They’re dead, aren’t they?


	70. The Bandit Court

I mean, she sort of knew it, didn't she.

_Seneschal_. The Ventrue turned it over in her mouth, tonguing that archaic word. Ten stiff fingers with ten mean nails were digging ruts around the steering wheel rubber. Odd sound. Try as she might, Ms. Woeburne couldn't nicely wrap her mind around it, and so she said the awkward title aloud, testing a new station like slipping on fresh boots. Seneschal Woeburne. Seneschal S. Woeburne. S. M. Woeburne, Seneschal of Los Angeles, public servant, cabinet of Prince Sebastian LaCroix.

It wasn't the catchiest thing to hang over a door, but it would have to do. And so would she.

Don't get excited. She'd really rather you did not.

Case-in-point: You must know that, discounting the PR blip, this ostentatious new badge guaranteed nothing for her. No influence over an onerous master, no real sway upon his jurisdiction, no increase in genuine clout. Not to say a little promotion was bad for an ancilla, stuck like a pin at the cornerstone cross between Foreman and Aedile. Quite the opposite, if she was smart. Complete disaster, if she was stupid. But Ms. Woeburne was smart—and rarely (if ever) stupid—so she'd told him yes, shaken his hand, taken it on.

No doubt there'd still be papers pushed, folders censored, and delicate errands dumped on her. But they now came with something more: a recognizable public face. New arrivals relayed fulsome greetings to Sebastian through her. Insignificant visitors sought his audience via Ms. Woeburne's consultation. She wasn't much more than a bureaucratic buffer, to be honest—a glorified squire that stood beside the throne, waving her polished ceremonial sword, shuffling peons away. While some Seneschals advised their superiors, this one had no delusions of power; Mr. LaCroix thought of his protégé as a courtroom ornament more than anything else, another hurtle for lowly Kindred to jump before presuming to pester him. He promoted her because she had been the convenient choice, and because he knew his own blood wouldn't contradict him. Better than nothing, though. Being a store mannequin Seneschal had strong potential to work in somebody's favor.

And besides that: it really pissed off Joelle.

Ms. Woeburne had outmatured having grudges eons ago. But even so, she was, you might say, looking forward to exercising some fresh authority over Mlle. Lefevre. Venture Tower's scarlet sting hadn't said more than two words to her since Mr. LaCroix publicized the promotion just after Christmas. They'd passed Easter now. It was late April. It was going, believe it or not, OK.

The Ankaran Sarcophagus had been hauled in, unboxed, and pushed neatly inside a locked meeting room. It replaced the massive conference table. She had yet to really see anything; Sebastian, impatient but not reckless, wasn't about to disturb ancient ashes without Beckett's encouragement. For now, Prince LA broke letter openers beneath the frustration of staring all night at his hard-won prize. Each sundown saw him grow more impatient for the Gangrel's arrival. He'd walk into that repurposed hall and glare at its heavy occupant, scowling beneath the overheads, studying the chipped wing carvings and primordial queens set in limestone, appraising the sturdy bronze weaving across its colossal lid. He was fixated and angry, regarding it hotly as a young boy denied his birthday presents. Maribeth Gutierrez had apparently landed a demotion for just for noting (not incorrectly): "you seem distracted."

Famiglia Giovanni's estate was emptier than it had been back in that sweating summer of white phosphorus and bipartisan failure. Ms. Woeburne stepped onto the premises with her mind made up not to recognize anything. Mostly, it was easy; the Doric columns and orange trees had been sanitized, the celebration erased. The place was cold—marble, kitchen cleaner, spotless floors. Guardsmen loomed over coat racks and peeked into lounges; footsteps echoed down long corridors. The house's guts were made of rich, gooey tradition—timeless stuff—a maze of unlit chandeliers, mustachioed busts, cocobolo bookshelves, no happy guests. It was an immense, vacant, old-world place that did not entertain.

No sooner than S.W. entered, Mira rushed her off to an inconspicuous foyer, explaining it would only take a moment. They waited with few smiles, few words, limited pleasantries. The artifact was boarded up and loaded into a delivery truck; she did not ask who reimbursed the stolen wreckage left on Santa Monica Pier. No opulent gesticulation. The Ventrue stood, arms crossed, outside a kitchen that smelled like pesto and formaldehyde. She got it done.

This mansion gave her a nasty _Pet Semetary_ feeling that hovered until morning, but otherwise, things went well. She'd returned to Sebastian for somber predictions about the coming months.

Ms. Woeburne was not, frankly, a major fan of her Sire's game plan, especially in regard to managing the dissidents. She was told to uphold an olive branch like a fork of cheese on a hook—but she was given no definitive advice on how to do so—and she was asked, among other things, to maintain an open dialogue so that Camarilla analysts could monitor Sabbat activity without actually having to land boots-on-the-ground.

_"It's not such a bad thing. A practical tool, perhaps, in the event we require future leverage against either party. My administration keeps its hands clean; you have an outlet to influence their movement in the area; and, best of all, they'll be too busy to uproot our current affairs. I approve of anything that might distract the Rabble long enough for this court to get some actual work done."_ She also recalled Mr. LaCroix saying this: _"You've read Kipling. You understand this necessity. It is our burden to humor those who are beneath us—to smile, nod, and hear them out with a look of genuine concern—however ridiculous their claims may be."_

Of course, he would say that. He didn't have to deal with them personally.

A Prince's sanction makes the task of negotiating with Brujah no less unpleasant. Perhaps it made things worse, for her status as Seneschal meant recognition through official channels; it demanded protocol and sustained correspondence, a certifiable relationship. This was an uncomfortable arrangement for a woman who'd not-so-long-ago done her term as their political prisoner. Yet Ms. Woeburne acknowledged that a faceless replacement would solve nothing; her history was half the reason this gambit might survive. Ventrue contacts are a hard sell to Anarch rebels—they patronize in legalese while serving poison wine—but this one had already blown her chance at a false-friend smile. They knew exactly who and what LaCroix's Childe was.

And this arrangement was more than just convenience. Since the pier fiasco, LA's deseated Baron had taken a troublesome interest in Ms. Woeburne's affairs—troublesome, but not unwarranted—and her new job description only made it more so. They wanted a liaison to the city's inner circle? They had one. She ended up hearing Free-State concerns in monthly town halls and filing long lists of grievances away for "future deliberation." Once every three weeks and by special request, political dissenters could order a bona fide Camarilla diplomat to stand primly before them, scratch notes, and say: _yes, yes; we are working on that; it will be taken into consideration; indeed, thank you, anyone else_?

Insincerity, paperwork, placation. Death squads fronted by yes-men with pleasant faces and merciless eyes. The politics of ceasefire is a Ventrue's burden—to be resented, distrusted, obeyed with contempt.

Rodriguez did not attend these rationed town halls. That was hardly surprising. The Baron shunned the Camarilla outreach—called their forums, more than once, "Venture's little powwow." He called their ambassadorial team "the lackeys." He said nothing about the Seneschal herself. It damaged their peace credibility and it cast doubt upon her new office, but in the long run, mattered little; they knew cooperation would insult him, and their goals were never to actually persuade.

Besides, this was a definite improvement upon their prior contact. She figured Rodriguez had a handful of operatives tailing her—one or two glowering skulkers, pea-shooters crammed in their vests to make them feel mean, children who'd run if anyone ever confronted them. And he probably figured she'd figured. But no one had shot at, approached, or hindered Ms. Woeburne recently, so to hell with a side of harmless spying. These were breadcrust politics, annoying but expected. No one cared to eat them or pay them too much mind. It gave everyone a few minute's access and it gave them some time.

The fact she scoffed, cringed, and spoke a little like a LaCroix in an awkward position only sweetened the pot.

It was a lot to ask of her. The Prince assembled a small staff for her more mundane responsibilities of being Seneschal; he got Ms. Woeburne three neonates, intern-faced, who dog-eared non-restricted paperwork and managed her overflowing datebook. Phillip Nelson, Harold Embry, someone whose name she didn't really recall. The Foreman rarely spoke with them face-to-face. Still, it was a help. It was a sign she was moving up into the real world.

Los Angeles's junior officer had sent a polite "greetings" to the city Primogen just yesterday. A purely ceremonious motion—they knew of her already—though one Ms. Woeburne felt the Prince would expect. His diplomacy was based upon the mask of civility and made a good show of it. Far be it from a protégé to break this mold. She imagined LA's clan council would find their new Seneschal's friendliness both presumptuous and unwelcome, traits already associated with the LaCroix name. There are worse names around these parts. Though, perhaps, not many.

Pestering her betters disturbed Ms. Woeburne. Buzzing like a fly makes her uneasy, no matter what the buzzing said, but she had a more important critic to appease. She was hoping—yes, hoping, if you'd believe it—to impress her Sire.

Anyway, you know—it kept her busy. It gave her a thick list of somethings to do.

At present, and speaking of the Anarch Party:

The next item on Ms. Woeburne's list had her slightly stalking Mr. Rodriguez, which wouldn't have been an issue if the Baron ever listened to his voicemail. Because he didn't, she'd been forced to call the downtown Den. Their very ill-tempered Mother—an awful little redhead who could never sit still during city summits, and who tended to pick up whenever S.W. found herself calling their piss-hole—grouchily explained that the Baron was on business. She wouldn't give directions. But Ventrue are rarely without resources, and rarely are they patient enough to sit back and tap their heels and wait.

The Seneschal got in her car, turned off her GPS, hit Anarch territory and simply drove around until she spotted him. It took her forty-five minutes, more or less.

The sulk was a giveaway. His hands were in his pockets, shoulders hunched forward, trying to be more unapproachable than a man in short sleeves might normally be. Woeburne frowned at the perilously there, treacherously identifiable black back of his head for a second, wondering if the Baron had any idea. She didn't think so. There was no visible armor beneath the lines of his simple clothing. He did not look back. It seemed implausibly easy to pick up a pistol and kill him.

Ms. Woeburne, as you know, doesn't trust easy. The Seneschal glanced this-way-then-that, worried about guards, scanning for snipers. She wasn't exactly equipped for it. She wasn't really in the frame of mind.

Then she panned down her blackout window and skimmed up to the curb.

"Rodriguez," she said. The Baron's head swiveled sharply, eyes open, and he skittered.

"Woeburne?" His eyebrows shot up at first, too surprised to be angry at the way she'd startled him. He stopped. So, too, did Ms. Woeburne. You could see in his chest how he'd sucked in a breath; she stepped into the brake. There was a strange set to the Anarch's face that could've been curiosity or disbelief. He hadn't guessed to see her under present circumstances—not on the cusp of Skid Row in springtime, not after their last mano-a-mano, and certainly not in private.

She managed a weak, struggling grin to show her intentions were docile. The Ventrue's hands squeezed a firm _eleven_ and _one o'clock_ around her steering wheel. "The head lackey. Yes. Are you busy?"

Suspicion starved the wideness and blueness away. "For what?"

"Don't be alarmed. I only want to talk, and I—"

"You following me just now?" Rodriguez demanded. She saw a hand traveling towards the man's hip and spoke up.

"Oh, please," Ms. Woeburne snapped. Her fingers wrung the wheel tighter and her teeth bit her cheek. You could see a holster strap under the Baron's shirt, which was a healthier color than his stare. "Well. Yes, I suppose I was," she confessed, grudgingly. "Look, will you just give me a minute? This won't take very long."

Nines didn't like the thought. His frown pulled a faded scar around one corner of his mouth. "I've got exactly a minute."

"Listen. I'm not trying to—" She dropped both hands onto her lap, exasperated, breathing out. One fast, get-it-done blink. "I realize the imposition. But I'm being frank with you. You haven't attended at my forums, and that leaves me few options. I'd thought—"

Rodriguez barked out an incredulous laugh. It was not a happy sound. It was less of a laugh and more of a loud, get-out grunt, a choleric feeling put to a noise. "NOW you want to talk to me?" Another restless glimpse swept up and down the hushed residential street. Questionable pawnshops, unwelcoming liquor stores, condominiums no one wanted to rent. Two men drank lazily at the nearest corner. A warm wind was rippling the digits of a palm tree. "That's perfect, Ms. Seneschal. Not suspicious at all. Especially since you just had my attention, and you decided you could do without."

"You understand the circumstances were—"

"What I understand is this: We're an awful long way from your tower to be striking up treaties at midnight. Here I am, going on my way. I am minding my own business. You just show up, bam, roll over on the side of the road? You know what this looks like to me?" She did. The stretch for that pistol had said enough. "Let me make something clear. You want to snub my advice, fine—that's your call—but you are not going to turn around and spit on me by asking for handouts, or expecting me to humor your play-nice panels. I am very busy. I am not _at your convenience_. Go on. Wave your caveats and your procedures at the Free-State; you can take center-stage and do a little Camarilla dance because _we_ have seen fit to allow it for now."

"Oh my god," Ms. Woeburne said.

"We have allowed it," the Anarch scolded, as self-righteous as he was threatening. She wanted to glance away, the silver of his first death unsettling in the man's face, but had learned better; Woeburne matched that look like absolute stone. Aggression is inherent in eye contact. Like any wolfdog, you must stare a Brujah down. "We allowed you your smoke and mirrors. But if you want to step back from all that protocol and all that capital bullshit to talk about real life, we are dealing with a different matter. This is personal and I don't do personal because you said so."

Woeburne scowled at him in the sham safety of her posh car. Hair stuck to a button of the crisp, clean blouse she wore. "Tough talk. But you have no idea what this is," the Ventrue reminded, darkening that unhappy expression a few more shades. Her outward shoulder dropped impertinently. She was not exactly unarmed. "You do, however, know that we have a concern with the same enemy. And you know I'm in a fairly good position to inform that concern. So, in turn, _I_ know that _you_ won't dismiss me offhand."

"Is that right," he spat, not at all a question. The men at the corner were casting curious, occasional looks their way. You could hear the unkind, disconcerted, inebriated murmuring.

"I'm inclined to think so. At least, I'd be impressed if you were that stupid. But you aren't, are you," she needled, a backhanded slap of a compliment, but a real point. You had to hate the precision stitch-pull of Woeburne's voice. "Because for all this history, you realize what we are dealing with now is not political, is not who-shot-who, and it's not about the DMZ. This is Sabbat we're dealing with. And you realize that they have to be dealt with. It isn't an option. It's not because I said it was. It's fact. Obvious fact. If we act immed—"

"Don't care. Take it up in forum."

"Nines—"

He turned heel and was already walking down the city block.

"You can't just? Son-of-a-bitch." Seneschal LA jostled for the stick; it stalled momentarily, leaving her cussing the gearbox back into commission. She rolled jaggedly forward, still pleading a case; the Anarch did not bother picking up his pace. The intended recipient of that _son-of-a-bitch_ was unclear. "You're making a real mistake here, Rodriguez. If you'll just listen. If you'll just listen to what I'm saying, you'll see what we mean and why it's—"

He wasn't even bothering to look now. Woeburne felt like slamming the horn and scaring him over a fence. In the interest of being professional and remaining bullet-free, she settled for bitching through a passenger window. There were few witnesses to contend with in this low-traffic, deteriorating strip of Los Angeles. Lamps flickered against concrete. They painted her vehicle; they bleached it, and them, unhealthy yellow, peppering monochrome circles down the dark street. She could see one of those two drunkards stand up from his sidewalk perch.

"This is information you should have had access to weeks ago. I'm passing it straight to you because of the volume and the urgency. And because I need to explain the relevance and why we haven't—" There was a one-way lane looming ahead. A stupid, inane law to fret over—she'd committed murder, fraud, theft and borderline treason—but… "It's a matter of defense. It's not a statement. I'm asking for much from you," the Ventrue snapped, R8 rumbling discontentedly beneath her. "Give me a chance to explain, at least! At the very least—you'd be a fool not to listen. You can do that much."

Men don't like being called fools, she's found. Nobody does, but especially them. He stopped short. Ms. Woeburne stomped the brake; momentum bucked her forward.

"I thought I told you—"

"PLEASE?" she asked, shrilly, impolitely, belting it out through clenched front teeth. Nines's lips tightened. They had become too irritated with each other for commentary.

"Fuck it. Fine—for now," the Anarch agreed, bratty about it, something not unwise to suppose he'd been planning all along.

Five steps took him up to and around the vehicle, where his right forearm propped itself along the window's upper lip, left resting near a handgun. Ms. Woeburne eyed it with derision, disliking the close proximity. At this range, it wouldn't take much skill to paint the speedometer with her brains.

"I got other places to be—just so you know," Rodriguez made sure to throw in. The Seneschal's eyes rolled in her rearview. He pretended not to see. "What's your problem, Cam?"

"I told you: it's business," she informed him. This was truth. Actually, Ms. Woeburne realized with a flinch against her headrest, everything she'd said to Nines Rodriguez tonight had been truth. "Official business, straight from the Prince. I can't exactly cram it into sixty seconds, but you'll want to hear this. I'd prefer if the entire street didn't."

The Bujah got quiet again. The standing human, a silhouette beneath lamplight, looked like he might come up and try to find out what was going on.

"Shall I put my hands against the vehicle?" Ms. Woeburne asked him. Her flippancy dealt a predictable prod to Anarch vanity that registered on his face. "Believe it if you can: there aren't any surprises in store tonight. It's harmless. Harmless as I'll ever be. Get in," she implored, "and I'll tell you all you'll want to know."

This time, the pause was considerable. She could see his eyes flicking back and forth, as nervous animals do when faced with a decision they do not like.

"If you try anything fast," the Baron cautioned her, utterly stern despite his ridiculous threat. He leant close enough to deliberately show teeth. She briefly considered stomping the gas and squealing out from beneath his arm. "I will shoot you right in the head."

Ms. Woeburne, rather than cowering, quite nearly laughed in his face. "I'll have you home by nine-thirty, sir," the Seneschal swore, her most earnest prom date tone. She was disappointed when he did not seem to get the joke. Nines frowned and stared.

"Truthfully." She gestured reassuringly to the passenger side. "I'm alone here. You can check if you'd like; I have nothing to hide. It's all right."

There was one last solid silence on the side of that road, and perhaps she should've taken the leeway to have second-thoughts herself. Instead, though—because she was a Prince-Childe with ambition on the mind—Seneschal LA tilted her head expectantly, nodded _go on_ , and tried what she thought was an honest, diplomatic smile.

"Put that away," Baron LA grumbled, thumped her roof, and grabbed for the handle before S.W. could punch the accelerator. He pulled her door right open.

"What are you doing," she snarled back. Woeburne groped for leverage and maybe for a weapon. It felt vulnerable to have one's whole side hanging out to the dirtier part of town. She moved to yank the cockpit shut.

"Driving," Nines said, as though it was a nothing suggestion, and she couldn't get it closed with his hand on the door.

"Hell if you are. This is my car." He wrenched it open anyway and proceeded to duck in. A highly chagrined Ventrue was forced to clamber into the passenger seat, catching her purse strap on the stick, leaving shoe prints right on a fold of leather upholstery.

"Hell if I agree to let you take me anywhere. Promise all you want; doesn't mean shit," he told her, shut the door, and kicked in the clutch. He did not look at S.W. (who was cursing), but sloppily, anxiously adjusted the seat and the rearview mirror. "You know if you're being honest, but that says nothing about your people. This works better for my reservations, and if it gets you my time you got no right to complain."

Ms. Woeburne considered drawing the gun she'd packed and whipping it into the side of his head, but settled, unsatisfactorily, for a clack of her teeth and a dragonish sound. He was obviously as afraid of snipers as the Seneschal had been, which she supposed you can't blame a man for. Still, S.W. resented being ousted and the sudden physicality of having moved.

At least the dialogue was open. At least there was that.

"This is a nice car, senator," Nines observed as it moved again, the sidewalk beginning to blur.

Woeburne flashed him a paper-thin look. "Thank you," she said. Seneschal LA watched the road markings, arm propped on the rest, knuckles pressed against her eyebrow. She felt oddly defeated to be sitting here.

"You must be working hard on that campaign fund. How much does a court seat go for these days? Hundred mil? Two? Or do you just write out a big blank check."

"I can't imagine why my funds are any of your concern," she answered, tired of the nonsense, trying to be cool. Rodriguez didn't like to talk to Ms. Woeburne until he had at least moderately pissed her off. It felt like losing to let him, though, so she sucked at her top teeth and roped in some calm. There was an economic gray Beretta compact wedged beneath her chair. It gave her a little comfort, at least.. "Do you want our cooperation, or not?"

"Do you figure I'd be here if I didn't?"

She pulled a folder from the dashboard and flopped it across her knees: five leaflets stuffed with blueprints, dossiers, intercepted messages, guesses at Black Hand targets."This is the collected data we've assembled. It maps the territories and patrol routes of several local packs, and there are some suggested tactics I think you can use. Everything here should be up-to-date as of two days ago. Mind you that these documents have not been censored. I was reluctant to release it before review, but after a discussion with the Prince, he has decided—" That wasn't appropriate anymore. "He and I have decided that it's best you have access sooner rather than later. Pay particular attention to the high mobility in Santa Monica. I'll go over all this with you in greater detail if necessary." Venture's ambassador gave a sober _ahem_. "You will notice that this is only an analysis, not a campaign plan. We have avoided strategizing for your people. If you want a consultation, you may seek one in a more formal capacity. We are glad to set aside a meeting to discuss about this. Find a neutral place for us to talk, and I'm willing to go over these tonight. But for now—as I said—feel free to use what I've written. This is a copy; you may keep it; courtesy of the LaCroix Foundation."

The unparticular grin that hacksawed Nines's face in the interim did not seem congruent with vaunted goodwill gestures from Ventrue government. It was a small, unfriendly, vile expression, worlds of dislike. "Mr. Rodriguez, are you listening to me?" she demanded.

"Sure. I'm _listening_."

"Then you'll have to fill me in on what I said that was so amusing. I don't see the—"

"Me managing your peoples' enemies, listening to your condescending bullshit, even though I just tried to resolve this mess with you myself. Stopping to hear you talk at me, when I have no particular reason to tolerate this, or to think it's true." He turned a corner too strong, overpowering the wheel. S.W. did not retreat, but could feel the riggings between her shoulder blades winch. Her look sobered. She glanced ahead down this claustrophobic, darkening ribbon of street. "But better than all of that is this little detail: Knowing every part of it, you just keep on trying to piss me off. That's pretty amusing. What can I say."

There was silence in which the politician, stern and forward-facing, wouldn't comment. She waited for an ultimatum. Or waited until the Seneschal couldn't stand it anymore, that is—because if there was going to be another stupid exchange of lethalities tonight, may as well get this train rolling—and finally stole a sideways glare.

Ms. Woeburne breathed out through her nose. Her teeth fit around her words evenly, sounding barren as they could be.

"Will you stop fiddling with things," she said, eyeing Rodriguez's right bracer with disdain. He was moving the mirror again.

"I am looking around. Nothing wrong with that," Nines protested. She doubted it. "Ceasefires make people nervous and they end fast. If I stand a chance to get bit—if I'm going to bother with this thing—I like to figure out what kind of snake I'm dealing with early as I can. Your people should understand that."

The Ventrue gulped an urge to scoff "My _people_?" because it was exactly what he wanted. "Well, if you find any epiphanies sitting in my car," she chuffed, just enough to sear. "Do tell me what kind of snake I am."

The insult earned her a lecture. "I'll tell you. You're a snake who's losing the high ground here, blueblood."

"Defensive. I wasn't implying anything," she lied. "I'm not one to give unsolicited advice. But it might help this arrangement—as it might help the Brujah—if some of them would remember that I have a job to do. I never said anything different. I am doing what I've been asked to do. I'm a diplomat—a _diplomat_. I'm not a lawmaker. I'm not police. So I'd appreciate it. Being treated less like the deputy dog."

"This is LA," the Baron said, as though that might explain something, as though being here could justify it all.

Ms. Woeburne did not really care. Her eyebrows hopped. "It's not exactly Carthage. Or at least," the Ventrue said. "It doesn't need to be."

He glanced at her thinly without turning his head. The threat was as irrelevant and insubstantial as it was tired. "That said, you do realize I can still beat the shit out of you."

" _Sss_ ," she hissed.

Rodriguez looked murderous for an instant—then gave her an undersized and unmeaningful smile.

It was enough. Ms. Woeburne pressed two fingers into her brow, let the antagonism drain out. Her headache was beginning to pinch. Her cheekbones were doing a poor job looking hierarchical and angular in this light, crowded by the pessimism of weary eyes and prideful chin. "I did plan on discussing something pertinent with you when I made this invitation," she said.

"I'm working on it. We'll go somewhere secure. Then you tell me what you people know."

"That _was_ my plan."

She folded her arms and thought about her desk and her well-lit room and her clean kitchen and she breathed out.

"Will you stop?" the Ventrue squawked, slapping her chair when she caught him fiddling with the compartment under her driver's-side chair.

"What now?"

"Sometimes people have things arranged a certain way," she explained—tried to explain, more scathing than sincere—the nuisance of it all making this needless row sourer than it should've been. Everything devolves into territory fight. Perhaps this is the nature of Ventrue and Brujah, or perhaps it's just become theirs: insignificant fights, competitions in miniature, erosion. The officer suddenly felt inanely protective of this flashy little car. "And they don't like them bothered with."

"Maybe it's espionage," he proposed. Espionage and edicts: the language of devil Patricians, of bad laws and pawns pushed through expedient contracts. It was a jab at something she could understand.

Woeburne did not like the joke. "Then it's the cheapest espionage I've ever seen. There's no bomb. There is no gun. Enough."

"I'm just trying to figure out a way to give you a little trust, Woeburne."

The fatalistic look Woeburne gave him was bitter enough to deserve her Sire. "Don't bother," she said.

Silence again.

Dialogue shut.

There was nothing else for a while. They drove quietly; the bite-sized conflicts were getting stale. She didn't have the patience and nobody had the time.

Had the Seneschal not been so tired of it, she would've demanded exactly where they were headed. Ms. Woeburne had assumed "secure" meant parking in an empty alley in a sleeping suburb where the Baron could interrogating her to his liking, worry less about Camarilla agents, and leave easily once he'd run out of useful questions. (P.S.: She doubted he would pay for the wasted gas.)

Suffice it to say, the Seneschal was confused, disoriented, then disturbed when the wheels stopped—and they weren't in a cramped dark noplace, but in a nearby someplace. They were parked right at the front row of a poorly-lit parking lot, cracked with heat and air-blown weeds.

"This doesn't make me uneasy in the least," she snapped. Ms. Woeburne didn't believe Rodriguez had any current grounds to kill her—he was, after all, free to take the data, hadn't she said?—but it's hard to feel good about old asphalt and broken streetlights. Glass teeth in a shattered bulb yawned over them. Beer bottles littered a far corner where the paint stripes had bled away, looking unofficial, like lines of chalk. She scanned quickly for body silhouettes in the scattering of vehicles around them. There were none. "Didn't you commandeer my car to avoid precisely this kind of place?"

"London, if I was going hurt you, you'dve been done at Carthage." Nines twisted off the headlights, yanked the keys from the ignition, and dropped them in S.W.'s lap. She jumped at their cold metal _chank_ through the thin black trousers she wore. Buildings around her—depressed, bleached brick, stacked shoddily, scowling down in tight angles upon them. It felt less than secure. "We're doing exactly what you said. Get your speech ready. Get what you got."

Ms. Woeburne removed her seatbelt, left hand sliding towards the hidden Beretta. Because, of course, there was a gun. He'd checked the wrong seat. There were ten rounds waiting. "Dare I ask: _why_ we are here?"

"Don't have a conniption, Ventrue. You've been great." Rodriguez's praise was contemptuous. Cool air washed in quickly when he opened the door. "So I'm giving you a free shot at your diplomat thing."

"What in the hell do you mean by that. I'll tell you this: if you think _we're_ cryptic. If you think I haven't been forthcoming. There are one or two things I've—"

The realization of being here hit her.

"Oh, NO," Woeburne boomed, nails sinking three full inches into her leather seat.

The Foreman's back racked itself up like a cat spine, body hair standing on end, shoulders shoving against the car confines in an attempt to wedge herself firmly in place. She did not need to bolt around front and see the people. She saw peeling storm paint. She saw a dingy rear door, boarded windows. She smelled, she swore, the firepower, the gasoline.

"No. No, I am not. Out of the question. Not an option. I'm going to spell it for you plainly, so there's no confusion: I will never set foot in there. Not tonight. Not ever. Take your records; we'll discuss them at an assembly. I'm going home."

The Audi was giving off a thick-headed, ajar door _ding-ding-ding_! It sounded like a railroad crossing. Rodriguez was standing just outside the driver's seat, arms crossed, presumably staring at her. The pistol beneath this foam cushion was a remote but welcome comfort. If he made a sudden move, Ms. Woeburne had already decided to blow a smoking crater right in the Brujah's groin.

"Woeburne," Nines sighed. The exhausted way he said her name communicated much.

"I'm not." The Ventrue had snatched up her keyring and locked the passenger door. He might've ultimately been able to overpower her, but he would not be doing so without a few dozen facefulls of kneecaps and shoe heels. She felt a little like a raccoon burrowed back in someone's cabinets, hissing toothy threats, spectacled coat puffed up to be larger than it truly was. "I'm not going in."

Were they planning on using her for a dartboard, after all? What a flagrant misuse of resources.

"Yeah, you really are," the Anarch countered. Brilliant. Impatience elbowed its way through his demonstration of bipartisan calm. His rings caught moonlight in their menacing, blunt weapon way.

"You're seriously mistaken. I mean, you're deluded. You're out of your mind if you even think for a _second_ I'd be stupid enough to—"

"Then I'm not listening to shit, and I'm done cooperating." That was not what she expected. The Brujah's face toughened, hatred hitting a whetstone. He flattened his fist on the R8 door, ducking down to glower at her, unfriendly, and just close enough to give her a second startling view of what was surely in his mouth. "I am willing to work with your people here, Woeburne. I have been _more_ than forgiving. But I am not going to risk my reputation taking intel from the new Seneschal without a public gesture of your goodwill. Are we understanding each other?"

"If you wanted a gesture, you should have come to a damned forum," Woeburne snarled back, fingertips curled up, making a fist, waiting within inches of her weapon. There was a rise along the notches of her neck. "What in the hell do you think I've been doing but handing goodwill to your people? I've got more goodwill than I know what to do with. I'm screaming goodwill. I'm shouting from the fucking hills—"

The Baron cut her off. "I'm not interested in a performance. You wanted a secure place to discuss business. I'm giving you that. But I am not afraid enough of some shovelheads to let you people put a hook in my lip. I will not have some knock-kneed Capes starting whispers that Nines Rodriguez is buying info from the fucking Ventrue. So here's how it's going to be. You're going to get out of the car, walk in that door—" He pointed. "—and you are going to sit down with me, and make it clear that this is still _my_ show or you can take your Camarilla armistice and shove it up your scrawny white ass."

" _That's_ your angle? You act like I'm a threat, and then you drag me here—no advance notice, no request—to throw an ultimatum on my lap? For what. Your reputation?" A tuft of hair had static-clung to her cardigan. "Your street cred?"

Nines's expression did not soften and his tone did not let up. "What do you think I got to stand on? I realize this is not the place a Ventrue consul wants to be," he admitted, though if that sympathy was supposed to reassure her, it did not. Its edges were hard and obdurate. She made herself straight and unassailable in response. "But I can't care right now. I got one condition. That's it. You need to get in there and make it clear to this place that you are working for us." Or so it went. She must've dead-eyed him. He didn't seem to care. "I don't give a shit if you believe that or not. I don't care if your Prince laughs when you tell him so. You bluebloods go on and laugh all you want. But if there are any doubts among my soldiers, our arrangement is over. And I won't owe you the courtesy of my tolerance."

The notion of parking outside an Anarch den and losing its Baron's "tolerance" was moderately terrifying. "I'm not here to feed your ego," Ms. Woeburne made herself seethe, a comeback just pointed enough to sidestep the tripwire. Mock them, yes; deride him, certainly. But she was not going to tightrope-walk on the edge of Brujah mercy again. "Why does it matter how I hold the conferences? It can't. Not this much. Rodriguez, do you even know what goes _on_ in my townhalls? Do you think I accomplish things there? It doesn't even matter what I say in them. What matters is that I am your Seneschal. I didn't have to come here at all—you realize this? That I'm speaking with you—exchanging data with you—is the biggest gesture I can give. Do you understand?"

"I understand," he shot, slammed the door on her, and left her to do what she'd do.

Ms. Woeburne sat there for another minute, deciding.

"Brilliant," she muttered, but gave up arguing, stowed her pistol in her purse, seized the folder, and clambered out.

_The Last Round_ was claustrophobic. It was disorganized, too old, and filthy; it was exactly what S.W. would've pictured if she'd had to, if she'd been asked. The cracked wood had been slapped over in a cheap hunter matte, flaking mossy green; the liquor storage space held ammunition next to beer cans; the badly-upholstered seats bled stuffing; the tables were scarred. On a quick glimpse, her first dissection, Woeburne counted seven visible firearms, four in clear violation of state law, and a bottle of diesel under a chair. They were probably brewing homegrown bombs. Photographs peeled away from thumb tacks and masking tape on the walls. She tried not to look. She did not want Anarch faces. Better to focus, eyes-forward, on the end-point, the goal. And there it was: a flight of dark, cramped stairs to a darker second floor, beyond the closet, past a weighted trapdoor that suggested they had a cellar. She did not want to think about a cellar. She did not want to start supposing what or whom it contained.

What did these people do all day? Play poker and stack soapboxes? No wonder the Experiment was failing.

They liked to claim their State had history. But S.W. was fairly sure the Anarch Nation's character was self-imposed. Unruly clans liked feeling dirty and agitated.

"I hope you know I'm not _speaking_ with anyone," Ms. Woeburne whispered from where the Seneschal walked behind him, a bitter, scathing sound in the entryway of a place she'd never wanted to be in the first place. Talk buzzed indecipherably from inside. "I'm not giving a speech. And I'm not shaking anyone's hand. These are my off-hours."

" _Shut up, Woeburne,"_ the Baron's look said.

She sighed dramatically, dismally.

She followed him in.

The downtown den was a line of neonate faces gawping blankly when she walked through—lives ones, not just the funeral photographs. Seneschal LA's expression was blindly straight-ahead, pace swift and unchallenging as possible. She didn't remember many names. There was the blond, straggly child who'd crouched in an office window and cocked a SWAT rifle at her chest so many months ago; Ms. Woeburne forgot his Party epithet, but recognized the salty mop of hair with a pang of dislike. He sometimes sat far back in her townhalls saying nothing, writing in a notebook. The motions looked more like margin doodling than anything else.

No doodling tonight, though. Kent-Alan's mouth dropped, eyebrows hefting up his broad forehead. He slid out of his corner of bar, leaving a Remington behind, thrust both hands in corduroy pockets, and simply remarked: _Huh!_

That summed it up, actually.

Seneschal LA reluctantly traveled upstairs, stuck in the shadow of her host, hoping the regulars might be too spooked by the whole thing to comment. At least then she wouldn't end up working a complaint desk from a table full of knife-marks. There were four rickety ones up here wedged under sober overhead lights, surrounded by bulletin boards. And at one of these tables sat that awful redheaded Den Mother. She was dishing orders to some shabby Gangrel footman Ms. Woeburne could not identify. Two ghouls stood attentively at the room's far side, startling when they spied intruders, darting closer to their commander, tapping her shoulder, wanting some answers, whining like dogs.

Damsel almost got out a " _what_ " before she saw who was coming up the stairs.

"Surprise" didn't cover it. She leapt up, chair skidding. Her face—obliterated; eyelids—peeled; jaw—swung open, emitting a nasally, foul-tempered, inarticulate bawk. The Ventrue could relate. Woeburne watched them all gape at her, not sure if they should dissent or run away. The Den Mother's fists were white-knuckling into themselves. She wore a thrift store beret that looked torn from the pages of an Army Surplus magazine.

Ms. Woeburne felt like a headmistress who'd just waltzed into the party room. She stood there trying to frown her authoritative best beside a Baron with dirt on his jeans.

_"God,"_ she thought—an unkind, but not unwistful reflection—at the seriousness of Nines's face and how far from a nice lounge in Hendon this sad insanity was.

The Seneschal expected Rodriguez to make a belittling announcement, but he didn't. He said nothing, actually, but "get out," and placed himself at a vacant table. Most of them scrambled. The crimson-and-camouflage girl made a stuttering sound like "Buh—but—SH!" and, for a while. Her eyes kept flickering between the Ventrue and her Baron as though someone might explain what she ought to do. "What the fuck did I say," he told her, and—looking wronged, bewildered, and a little bit scared—Damsel about-faced and thudded away. The Toreador, who'd been blinking up after them from the bottom of the stairwell, neck ostriched out, skedaddled.

She could remember a different time, sure. In the back of her head, that memory was an old, dusky mist—an awareness, distant but alive, of the time when these people were the greatest thing she had to be afraid of. It made her feel a little pathetic, and a little bit sad.

Still. As Ms. Woeburne shrugged off and hung up her cardigan, she could have sworn a male whistle downstairs just managed the first few notes of "Cruella de Ville."

"Well, there you go," went her first churlish observation of the night.

It doesn't matter how big and angry they are. You can see—when you look at them like this—that the Ventrue have done what they set out to do. They have made the Brujah small.

"What more do you want?" she insisted straightaway, brows furrowing over a spurred stare. You could feel ears twitching one floor below. "May we go over the contents of my report now? I've told you its history, and I explained the delay, but I'm obligated to detail whatever you wish."

He chose the table farthest away from her; through the gloomy windows behind him, Ms. Woeburne could see purple sky above her stark automobile. It was a balmy April night, cloudless and hot. She was standing upright, chin thrust an inch above its natural resting place, collared shirt glaring white, flimsy boots stiff against creaking floorboards. S.W. held the embossed folder over her navel, a disciplinarian stance. She was not offered a chair, and would not have accepted one.

"I think they are self-explanatory. Everything is there. But if you want my consult—"

"I don't see what's so confusing about this. All I needed was for you to show your face," Rodriguez told her, with not much more to say. The seat creaked when he settled into it. Baron LA glowered at his own folded hands, linked on the knotholed wood. When he looked up again, directly at her, a strange déjà vu occurred; something about the suddenness of that face made her think of a basement, of insufficient, fatal light. There was a familiar ring of emptiness around bleak irises: a hollow touch, a death stamp, one Ms. Woeburne saw nightly in her own reflection. She had to wonder if this is how she, too, appeared—to humans, to ghouls, to Kindred younger than herself, to those Rabble children sitting unheard in neat corporate rows of Nocturne Theatre every Thursday Sebastian said _do it now_. It was a small white glint of savageness, hints at afterlife, a little bit of the ghost. It reminded you. It hissed that every nagging thing you felt is not-quite-genuine, an echo of something, warped. Metallic blue regarded her coldly. She narrowed back.

"Trading intel with the Camarilla is a dangerous game. You're a mouthpiece. I get that. And honestly, it would be nice to have some help beating the Sabbat back for once. But you had your chance to convince me neutral ground was an option—and we both know how that turned out. So from now on, we're going to handle this on our terms. No more office visits. No more goddamn theater meetings, since it's obvious you won't use them to discuss anything halfway important. I have better things to do with my nights than play along in your little appeasement show. You want to approach me, you do directly, you notify me, and you do it alone. Is that understood?"

Woeburne glanced at him sidelong. It must've looked ridiculous—a rigid Seneschal beneath an Anarch poster, bulbs bleeding the wrinkles off her button-down. She did not sit. "That's a lot of caveats for a dissident."

"You need my cooperation, this is the price."

"You assume anyone _needs_ your cooperation?"

You could practically hear the jaws hanging downstairs.

"I assume nothing at this juncture," he grumbled, dismissing her comment, and afforded a chastising look. "Just wanted to make sure you and I are on the same page. There are attachments to dealing with you people I have no time or patience for."

They are afraid of me, she thought.

The knowledge of this came upon her with sudden fullness and clarity that meant she could not disbelieve it. _Snake in the grass_. It occurred to Ms. Woeburne that the last Free-State has been afraid of her and the New Rule Ms. Woeburnes presage before any of this began.

"Very well," she told him. The Baron hmned, but his look unbalanced quickly, and he only regained it by scowling uselessly at his own hands. "If that is what your people require."

The Ventrue's eyes flashed unfavorably in his direction. Hers were indeed a little sharper, a little less vague, owning their color precisely. She stepped forward and dropped the folder onto his table from too high a height.

Nines laid everything out upon the tabletop and looked at it. When he was finished, the Brujah collapsed her report into a single lopsided stack and thought some. Ms. Woeburne had to resist the compulsion to divvy them into proper groupings. She felt badly standing there, in this den. Bad, that is—wicked—ominous—evil, a simple-minded word she did not buy into. People like her plan for war in rooms of marble and stone.

"Acceptable?" the Seneschal inquired, growing impatient. Rodriguez rubbed at his thin moustache.

"Fine. We will take your information."

"I thought so. As I said, you may have that. We trust you won't waste our efforts." She noticed how the Baron did not look at her, distracted, deliberately, by a map in his hand. The Ventrue cleared her throat. "Well. You've got strategizing to attend to and I'm expected in an assembly later. May I go?"

"I insist," the Brujah said, dropping the papers back to the wood. He lurched out of his chair with moonglare slingshotting off the pendant around his neck and the metal on his wrists. But Ms. Woeburne's demeanor was colder than anything these people could have done, or thought to do. "No more forums. If you need to communicate with us, you go though her—" (The Den Mother.) "—or you go through me."

The Ventrue's look was cynical, and her sarcasm was uncomfortably loud, uncomfortably obvious. Restraint is a sign of the times. "You're the boss."

It was a little unnecessary. All right.

Ms. Woeburne was downstairs without incident, through an exit door, and then she scurried out to her car, jumper slung over one shoulder, relief in her overlarge, too-relieved steps.

Then what.

Then: b _oom_.

 

**II.**

 

She was out of here. She was hollering something futile about forums. She was no longer his problem, not tonight, and he had nearly turned back inside when a movement caught Rodriguez's attention across the unlit street.

It didn't feel right. He couldn't tell you why, because he couldn't put a bead on what it was, but somewhere out there, under the yapping of Ventrue voice, past the shot-out streetlamp nobody had fixed, Nines swore there was a thing that went wrong.

He squinted.

He stared at it. He squinted harder.

Some weird burn of a smell in the air.

It clicked.

"WOEBURNE GET AWAY FROM THE"—all he got out.

The soft clink of her fingers on the handle of the door.

The Seneschal's R8 went up in a hot burst of orange, front tire exploding, siding crinkling like cigarette paper.

The shock shook the windows in the place behind him. It blinded Rodriguez for six good seconds, spraying car glass, knocking out the two functional streetlights. Thick, chemical smoke poured up, upholstery dripping off metal frames. It was like the thing just popped—POW—dents in aluminum like a bag of kettle corn. Step—boom—gone.

Before the blast: Woeburne had stopped just in time to look back, grimace, say _what the f—?_ And then, in that slow blast of color, she was gone, too.

The force of it put the Seneschal midair. Her body punched backwards, skull whipping forward, jacket catching fire, and then he lost her for a few moments, thrown into the sear of not being able to see. Woeburne was airborne, then she was down, and then a second blast ruptured her fuel tanks, destroying the automobile. The Ventrue went head-over-heels on the concrete. _Dead_ , Nines thought, immediately, no other thing to think, annihilated, blown off the earth, in the world then lit out of it, right on his doorstep, over the territory line, from their den to nothing, and the horror bloomed in him like a bombcloud, running cold, numbing his fingertips, paralyzing him, wrongways up his throat, siphoning the blood to his feet—dead Seneschal—unprecedented—dead, everybody—murder charge—Victor de Luca—expert opinion—open fire—bullet opens the back of his brain.

Dead Seneschal on the concrete full of poison and glass.

Then she picked up her head and she tried to get up.

A man was running down the alley.

Somebody opened fire. Kent-Alan was the first soldier outside, sprinting through their entryway with bewildered eyes and hands groping his firearm. While Nines stood there, frozen, dumbfounded, ash-faced in the burning, he'd looked past everything, to the edge of the lot, and spotted the body hopping a chain-link fence.

"Kent, get him. Go," Rodriguez shouted, jarred by the discharge. Kent-Alan nodded, dashed for his jeep, and screeched away. Damsel was on the stoop a moment later—snarl out, shotgun cocked, flanked by Bernardino and both of his ghouls. They stood there a minute. They blinked at the gutted Audi, bonfire washing new color across their faces; it was now burning a steady shade of alloy green.

Nines looked to Woeburne, her elbows on the blacktop with a sooty face and shaking hands.

When she finally moved, there was a real moment of chaos in which the Ventrue had completely lost sense of where she was or what had happened. That majordomo air she carted around had been blasted out of contention. Her shirtsleeves were soaking up a grimy, wet, toy-car red, and doing it quickly; tiny shards like buckshot had freckled them, nailing cloth into skin. Embers blackened the tidy white of her lapels. It looked like chickenpox, like oily charcoal measles; her dark hair was ragged; melted makeup ran along the snooty planes of her nose. Blood was streaming from her nostrils and, if you looked closely, the Ventrue's mouth was open, just slightly—her jaw wobbling—her eyes glossed over in a quiet, trembling childhood.

There were no other words for what was happening to S.M. Woeburne. She sat up on the tarmac, stared wildly, touched her eyebrow, and said, "My arm hurts."

"But my arm," Woeburne protested, bleary stumbling up with jelly legs that couldn't find their ankles as Rodriguez wrapped a fist in her collar and dragged Seneschal Los Angeles inside.

She could sort of walk. Knee blood soaked through her pant legs, and god knew it was going to ugly under that shirt, but more alarming was the Ventrue's face. Gravel had hammered one entire side, raising an ugly rash of bruises from her temple to her chin, mottled together like someone who'd been hit with a baseball bat. She didn't seem to be aware of it. There was a gun in his free hand (though he wasn't completely sure how it got there) and a bunch of fabric in the other; her top buttons popped off and rolled somewhere, making this remnant of Woeburne mumble about her coat again, but you couldn't really say where the rest of her had gone.

She is a target. She's a target, Woeburne, and they'd all made themselves enemies, so you couldn't call it a surprise, but it was an emergency. Big red dartboard, right on London's head—the unleaded stench of this finally making all of their talk seem real—and it wasn't just his crosshair, not anymore. He had to handle this. He had to get her indoors and get those pieces of car cleaned up. He had to make sure they weren't implicated in what happened—what almost happened. Lucky shot could take out one of the last legs the Free-State's got to stand on.

"Oh my god," Woeburne said, for the second time tonight, when he kicked the door shut and slapped her down into a booth.

The Ventrue almost didn't come off his sleeve when he swung her ahead of him to sit. The thump of old leather against cheap woodframe seemed to knock some speech back to first gear, though, and Woeburne processed the new setting, being moved back into a place she had never wanted to be. Pin-prick pupils in predatory eyes were an uncivilized quarrel of black and aloe. He backed off to give her some air. She looked around for a dazed, furious moment, curled both hands over her collarbone, panted a few times, then began to steam.

"They did it. They tried to kill me," dawned, decisively, and in the scorched indignity of that moment, she had never looked more like Sebastian LaCroix. "Mother fucker. They tried to kill me. I figured—I mean, I knew—obviously they must have been tracking me—following, I mean, my movements—but this is—" A gasp that turned into a choke. "Who in the hell."

He didn't fill in the blanks for her. The Ms. Woeburne who thinks and talks and hands out orders had put that together already.

"Shit," London finally shrieked, hands flopping to her thighs, then wrapping around her abdomen, hunching as though she might be sick. The Seneschal's entire self was shivering on the upholstery. None of the kids running around outside came back in. Woeburne did not particularly notice. She reeked of diesel.

"Close that window." The Seneschal gestured with one bossy, battered arm. He did. "They've probably been after me for weeks. Why did I let you bring me here! We're right at the edge of the compound. Fucking Conservatives. Stupid fucking dogs," she wheezed, slumping backwards, sinking, until you could no longer see the Ventrue behind the tabletop. One of her heels had snapped off somewhere and the uneven foot dangled over the seat cushion.

"I could've died," Ms. Woeburne groaned, like car bombs had to have been a joke.

You want to frame an Anarch? You blow a puppet Seneschal to bits.

"I could've died here." Her left hand, knuckles swollen and scraped bloody, was clenching the counter rim. The rest of London still lay corpse-stiff across that booth couch. "I could've burnt to a crisp right in front of this shitty bar. April twenty-first. Four mouths in the office. And that would've been it. Cooked. _Boom_. Gone. I could've just strolled right past that curb and into a tabloid. The fucking Sabbat. _Me_. The Sabbat. Did you see that? Do you hear me?"

The gun was still in his hand, he noticed. He'd wait another minute or two to put it away. "I told you this might happen."

"I can't be here. I can't. I've got to go." Her hand was in her hair, finding a cut, and got caught; a small ring snagged itself. She tore the thing out. There was a thin, weak red on London's fingertips. It was too early to tell if they'd been following her or him. "I need to go to the tower. The notion—I mean, the thought—that they could murder a diplomat in the middle of the—"

"Calm down, Cam. They won't hit you twice in one night." (It was a lie; such a thing was entirely possible, but she wasn't helping anything by being like this.)

Woeburne only bobbed her head, chewing on a cheek, expression vacant. Complacence was a bad sign. He put his pistol away, though didn't particularly like doing it. The flash image of that gaunt neck snapping forward kept stuttering behind his eyelids—half-a-second, combusting into red-yellow-white, body hitting and tumbling against the street hard enough to have been dead in earnest. It happened too fast to see. But there was a scrambling instant in that aftermath blaze he was sure she'd been roasted. Dead Seneschal on this doorstep. Games over. London said it right, because that was all there'd been. _Boom_. His chest was tight. He noticed that, too.

"I've still got my car. Want me to go with you?"

The unusually friendly proposition at least brought a little Woeburne back. She glowered at him, head poking over the countertop, and scoffed. " _You_? I think not." And the Ventrue lay back down.

"Suit yourself." To tell true, there was nothing that could've gotten Nines in the shadow of that Tower—not right now, not for a long time—but he preferred Contemptuous London to Scared London. This new creature disturbed him. It was rickety, more difficult to hate, and the apolitical, fledgling way she'd grabbed onto his jacket to stand herself up danced right over Rodriguez's grave. "But you need to get out of my den."

_Boom_ —and it would've made a lot of people's night.

That was a little better. Woeburne thumped the underside of the table, sat up, removed a phone from her pocket, and was dialing a cab. "It's clear enough what they were trying to do," she told him, and couldn't see it in his face—the black-and-blue mess of hers. She'd never looked that bad, the Anarch told himself. He could not remember already. No way it had ever been that. "I'll go in and file a full accounting straightaway. You'll be exonerated, of course. Think they can weaponize me—hah. HAH. I won't allow it. Not like this. Not just, you know, like that. I'll tell the driver to pick me up somewhere else," she was saying, unbroken shoe tapping the floorboard in an uneven, manic rhythm, unable to settle down. "It shouldn't be a problem. Few blocks down. That would be the prudent thing. I understand the inconvenience this being at your door."

Twenty minute wait, the taxi service said; she hung up, drew up her kneecaps, and dropped her face onto them, breathing out.

Outside, Damsel and crew were into the business of damage control. They'd hosed off the crumbled husk of car and started stripping it down, dragging the glowing pieces off for disposal. This was really what Red was best at—the cover-up, diverting investigations, dousing the fire. She could keep things quiet. She kept them under control.

"I need to clean myself up before getting in that cab. I must look like hell," London realized. The Ventrue's brow had left smudge marks wherever it sat.

"Do what you need to do."

She unfolded, stood up—stepping gingerly, limping a bit—and moved behind the now vacant length of bar. Woeburne retrieved a handful of paper towels with which to wipe grunge off herself, running them under a sink, squeezing out excess water. Her reflection was mangled in the cracked mirror. But looking into it made the Ventrue notice herself—see the horrible right cheek, the glass shards scattering both forearms when she'd instinctively tried to shield herself. She cringed. She raked her mess of hair into a tight band. Rubber-band, because that's what was available. Twisting the faucet on harder, cringe widening since doing so hurt her skinned palms, Woeburne set to work; she rinsed them, cupping water and splashing her face. Once, twice, thrice—the dried nose blood and sediment faded, but that bruise did not. Something chemical must have gotten into her mouth, too, because when London grabbed a nearby tumbler, filled it and swished, she spat black into the basin.

Her hand heels pressed into the rim of that unglamorous sink. Wet tail-ends of short hair dripped an oddly centered water line down the back of her shirt. Weediness below the sheet of necessary, good-corporal calm; five-dozen gears ticking and turning for the order they belonged in. "May I please borrow a pair of forceps?" Woeburne asked, thin and frank, as though she'd just requested a pen.

He put the first-aid toolbox on the table where she'd just been sitting. After patting off her mug, the Seneschal sat back down, delicately rolled up both sleeves, and counted the glass flakes twinkling there. She did not pause to empty her head. She opened the box, browsed for thirty seconds, and made do with one set of stainless steel needle-nosed pliers.

He watched London sit there and pluck them out. Wrist-to-elbow, mouth taut, depositing bloody fragments in a neat little pile on the countertop. She didn't say anything else. There was only an occasional wince—a wrinkle in her bridge, a purse, a crinkling of the eyelids. It was a grim sight. Rodriguez didn't want to say anything or see her do it, so he pressed himself against the wall and looked at the floor.

"And I would like a firearm, please. Mine's lost."

Nines did not miss that. He found a small one in the closet nobody would notice gone and put it pistol next to the bloody glass heap. "Said you were unarmed."

"Passenger side," she informed him, obviously.

Woeburne's progress was swift and compassionless. When she'd finished, the Ventrue cut her ruined shirtsleeves away, cuffing what was leftover. She kicked the stiletto off her other boot to even them out. Eventually, the breathing stopped, and the Seneschal closed her eyes, almost like falling asleep.

"Move, snake," he told her.

She opened one eye.

"Oh, stop it," the Seneschal bit, and stood up. She deserted the booth and rose, dusting herself mindlessly, to retrieve a waste basket. The pliers were rinsed and placed neatly in a dish rack. Her stack of loose glass she simply swept into the trash. "It's embarrassing at this point, don't you think."

"What?"

"What," she echoed. Ms. Woeburne tucked in her misshapen collar, then rotated her arms, checking them over, semi-satisfied.

Before he could call the Ventrue a snake again, she'd impatiently pushed out a sigh, propped herself against a corner of the bar opposite him and folded both arms sulkily across her chest. It was a very strange stance for Woeburne—and he almost said so—but then her hip dropped, oddly familiar now, and then her shoe kicked back against the siding, and her jaw went tough; she cast brutish, bedroom eyes towards the ceiling and put on her best Brujah, bleeding arms, pistol in her belt, yellow shiner, busted lip and all.

It occurred to Nines Rodriguez he was being mocked. And, to be honest, the whole thing would have pissed him off had Woeburne not been doing a pretty good job.

"There you have it," the Ventrue announced, shaking it off in a heartbeat. Broken shoes made her wobble a bit. She took one last glance in the dingy mirror, swallowed a crack in her throat, and dabbed her neckline with a moist rag. "I could take your job."

Nines glared at her. "That supposed to make me laugh?"

"Not really," she said—pointed, do-you-know look, one eyebrow up. "Did it."

Ms. Woeburne was all right. She was going to be all right—she was certain, positive—and if she flattened them tightly, as she was doing now, you could not even see her wrists shake.

"I'm leaving, and I suspect you'll get another update. If you identify any persons of interest, you are expected to notify me, and we will investigate. I recommend you wait for that investigation before mobilizing. Until then, study the reports. I worked hard on them," she insisted, meaning it; she picked up her few surviving belongings; and the Ventrue made a beeline for the street.

She let the door bang behind her: boom, gone.


	71. Skid Row

The endtable hurtled across the room, legs cartwheeling. Good throw. Colton ducked it.

"One time," screamed the Ductus, disappointed and monstrous in Hallowbrook's Floor Two lobby. Saliva glistened around Marcus's mouth, dry pink edges cracking, nose twitching where the Gangrel could see. The cheap furniture smashed into a moldering wall and splintered, period for his sentence. "Shut the tear in your face, blood-sack. I ought to scalp your fat fucking head. Stupid enough to fuck up this one job I give you and drag your sad sack of shit carcass back here. Shit—I wish those Anarchs caught you. Don't you dare look at me."

King chopped his stare down from Torres and focused instead on the Brujah's shadow, its edges lunging tall along the blue ivy wallpaper, the waterlogged peelings, the vanilla-cake paint. He was reminded of cave paintings. The silhouette of Marcus—high, surreal, scary, the oldest shit, the fire creeping on the rocks. That old shit still affected Colton. He was easy to scare, really. He was kind of yellow. He was not somebody to disobey an order, either, but needed to keep one eye looking; he needed one peripheral on watch in case that shadow hurled something worse his way.

Colton is afraid of Marcus. Yes. He is not so new and not so big as to find it hard to admit when he's scared.

And that's a gift, because it means he isn't dumb enough to bet on mercy, either. He doesn't let himself think the Ductus wouldn't grab his jugular and shake chunks off like a crocodile. Saltwater animal. He doesn't doubt the possibility of fire pokers shot right through his stomach. He doesn't doubt Marcus. He isn't sad enough to close both eyes.

"Tell me this is some sort of joke. I mean, shit, it's got to be," the Brujah snorted, crossing cordy arms the color and texture of sandpaper, anger moving the meat across that breastbone, redbrick wall. Had a little gut clinging to his belly. You couldn't see it often, but when he blew-up like this, filled himself with violence and air, his body seemed too large to fit inside its skin, and there it'd be. Two inches of soft stuff on an anti-tank. Veins bulged beneath the shaved buzz along his skull, pale bristles curling around temples offset with wide cheekbones. He looked like a heavyweight contender, except for that—one human spot of fat. "Jesus fucking Christ. Why I continue tolerating these sag-assed backwater shovelheads is beyond me."

Colt knew that was a snare. He didn't say anything, and he didn't look, not more than the corner of that one eye. Marcus hawked a glob of spit onto the shabby rug beneath his feet. You couldn't tell the color anymore—lavender, maybe, baby shag, flowers on the edge. One boot toe rubbed the saliva into a cigarette burn. "Tell me something. What good is this pack to me when I can't trust one of you mutts to come crawling back with anything but your ass cheeks in your hands? I give you one single solitary ounce of responsibility and what the fuck do you do, King? What do you do?"

Colton might've been a lousy assassin, but wasn't halfway stupid enough to get his leg caught in that bear trap. He stood firm and quiet across their otherwise silent antechamber, aware of his aloneness, no strength in numbers. The fireplace was blue steel and cold. It was hunched posture for the Gangrel, instinctual evidence of submission—he was too smart to argue or posture or say _I tried_. But he couldn't be unseen. That red disaster of hair curled raggedly around both of his put-together ears, standing him out, wild pigment pouncing to the stubble and thickening over his chin. He couldn't slip by. He is spotted. That's just who he is.

' _Say what he wants. Let him say what he wants,'_ Colton tried to reassure himself, hands flexing in his jean jacket pockets, finding and worrying new holes. _'I'm not losing another body part. Whatever the fuck he wants. I've got no reason to get hurt.'_

Colton wasn't going to be hurt, and he wasn't about to lose his life over a misunderstanding when nobody else was around to back him up. When the Gangrel returned to Hallowbrook, and someone spread some rumors and some truth about what hadn't happened to the Prince's new cabinet tonight, Torres found King—not the other way around. Maybe that made everything worse. The Ductus opened his mouth and flaunted fangs in the dim light of this room, destroyed a shabby loveseat, and roared "GET OUT" to everyone else. They got out. Inés, too. She smuggled him a grim, low-lidded look, but that's all. He didn't blame her. She was still new meat. He couldn't really feel angry or be hurt.

Right now, Marcus was pacing, smashing the slivers of wood scattered around with the heels of his boots. It was old furniture, anyway. Everything's old in here. Colton stepped back and felt more splinters. He used to have a paper route. Really, a paper route, like he was born in the fifties or something. It made chump change and it taught him how to get away from mean dogs who manage to jump the fence. You don't pedal on like there's no way you'll get tired eventually and need to stop. Because a mad dog doesn't get tired. He has nothing else to do in his shitty little mowed yard life but chase boys and sleep in the sun twitching and imagine what their calf flesh tastes like. What you need to do is get off the bike. Put the back tire between you and the teeth—doesn't matter what kind. Bulldog, Chow Chow, Beagle. Keep out of striking distance. Rather than face Torres down, thinking about dignity and pecking order, King tried to look every bit the omega he was. The tender regrown skin surrounding his ear burned wildly whenever their Ductus closed another step between them. He tensed. He swallowed.

He dipped beneath a glass lamp Marcus had ripped off the funerary wallpaper and chucked towards his face.

"Son-of-a-bitch, boy." Marcus hawked it out and let it fly. One frothy smack on the rug. It went to bubbles. Colton remembered watching Cujo as a kid. Unwanted images: pretty woman in a tank-top, sweltering in the car. That movie scared the piss out of him. Unwanted details: when she held her son's body, the outline of the beige, the lines of wire under her bra. "You are really something else. You're a fucking wonder. I hand you a Seneschal's head on a platter, and you— _you_ , shitface—of course, you found some way to fuck it up."

Colton had to gulp a cactusy lump rising in his throat. He couldn't speak otherwise, and the Ductus waited for him—blond eyelashes, deceptive calmness, suddenly wanting to talk. Col didn't know why he bothered trying to talk to Marcus. He'd get socked if he didn't. He didn't know what would happen if he did. "I did everything you told me," the Gangrel said.

It is pretty easy, to be straight with you. It's not etiquette and rulebooks at this level, or with their Ductus. You get the job done or you get licked. You say what you have to say when an alpha's got you up against a backboard like this. Shit, he wasn't a coward. He was smart. _Smart_ , and it is a really important word to Colton, like _clean_ is to Camarilla. He pressed his tongue against decades-old scar tissue along his inner cheek, diagonal, canine to chin. Cokehead tore a lip ring out of it. Way back, way-back-when, some monetary fistfight outside an Alabama crackhouse. Weird how that shit sticks to you. Dead bodies in a bog full of pitcher plants, bulb-eyed, fish-still, staring at him. He'd sack them and roll them out of the back of his jeep: snitches, runners, gang-jumpers, cheats. Sometimes Colton thinks about the fact he woke back up and those fuck-ups didn't, and that's the weirdest thing there is. That shit freaks him out.

"I stuck to the plan," he told Marcus, stomach kicking his ribs, percussion solo. "It was a shit bomb; I don't know. I didn't make it. Too much baking soda," King guessed, wildly, not completely sure if it was a joke. "I didn't have any control over that. But I followed the—"

Marcus's mouthful of teeth twisted into a madcap, furious smile. He looked like a woodchipper. It held for maybe five seconds. "What the fuck you talk about, I never do know. You think I'm gonna tell Bishop you _tried_? That you gave it your _best_ , numbnuts? How the fuck do you expect that going over?"

"It was unstable. Bad batch. Tell him that. It was the bomb."

"Let me make something clear to you," the Ductus said, and the upward swoop of his voice, and the shadow where that grin was, and the purple color under his nails made Colton feel his tailbone. He'd tuck one if he had it. He swallowed again and his mouth was pooling saliva but his throat seemed dry. "This isn't a little accident. Whups! Fuck me; bad bomb. You don't get a do-over, shitbird. We don't get another window like that. And you come into my den, look at me like the busted rubber you are, and your excuse is _what_. Bad batch. That's fucking great. That's incredible."

"I did what you told me to do."

"Tell me one more time." Marcus cupped one hand to his ear and leaned in close. The innocuous gesture would've made some other shock troops laugh. "You did _what_?"

"What you told me." Colt watched the weak _me_ slough that funniness off Torres's stare. Sayinh it had been like rolling a river rock up his throat. There was a quiet astonishment the Ductus hadn't hit him yet. Humor, gone—no batted lashes, craning neck. It left just the eye whites. Glass.

Marcus scoffed, grimaced, and spat again. He growled. He flattened a palm at Colton's collarbone and gave him a sudden, rough shove away. It wasn't enough to hurt him. That scared him more than anything, maybe. He felt something under that hand, over his sternum, harsh, brotherly, disappointed, and suddenly, King realized it: he was ashamed.

"It's not like I sent you barreling ass-over-ankles. All I asked you was to dust some limp-dick politico—shit, I _handed_ you that bluebood's ass. And you can't even do that for me. What the fuck can I even say to you? I met some morons in my time, you retard redneck asshole, but you take the fucking cake."

Colton had put his hands over the place Marcus pushed. It was reflex, and he felt like catching his breath to regain the lost air, like it had left a hollow space in him, a flinching of muscle around an absence. He'd stumbled a little over a hump in the rug and had to save his balance. Six steps back, some more space. You need a little space to live here. Marcus was still looking at him like a man shaking his head, like Colton's man, even though he wasn't, not at all. Colton was too smart for that. He shut his eyes for a half of a second and waited to feel something else.

 _I hate you,_ King thought to himself, looking at that face again, gritting through the Presence and Vinculum like someone in a whorl of stinging sand. Sooner or later it was going to pass. _I hate you, you actual piece of shit, I hate you, I want to smash your fucking face in._

Eventually it was hate again. The Gangrel let his arms fall, tight and childlike to both sides, keeping his face tilted just down enough to give it a shot at protecting his jugular vein. He saw and heard the Ductus approach him again. There was a busted chair leg on the floor and Marcus crunched it, then kicked it, rolled it right out of the way, like he was going to rip King's arm off and then tidy the place up a bit, make it more comfortable, you know? Colton wanted to back himself into a corner, small and dark. He needed the physical support of walls pressed up against him. Dogs need places to put themselves like that, too—to get tiny, to try and fade, to dematerialize, just for a minute, become part of a house that is stable and not going to change. Instead, he stood still. He froze, waiting, thinking no joke, sometimes the grizzly just passes you by.

"You know what gets me, though. You know what really busts my balls. We could've got that street back. Toasted Seneschal; so long, Anarchs; moved right back in. What part of this didn't work for you. What here just didn't sound like something you wanted to be a part of."

Colt wasn't stupid. Colt was smart.

When he didn't look, and he had nothing else to say, Marcus reached. He sank a fist into the footman's undershirt. Colton could feel those nails threatening the skin and in that moment he wasn't smart anymore at all.

"I know this is especially hard for you, King—" It wasn't, but now it was, with the jaw dropping open to show long Brujah fangs. His face was different, his voice was different; hoarse bullroar down to a rattlesnake sound; but this is all Marcus Torres really is. He loomed over you. He was _over_ Colton—better, meaner, everything but smarter—and it took every bit of willpower Colton had not to turn his cheek away. "You just can't keep your shit together. You just can't. But _you_ want to know something about _me_? I don't care. I don't care about your coked out mama. Or your crackbaby ass, or bad neighborhood, or that your daddy banged your sister—whatever the fuck is wrong with you—I don't give a shit. I don't care, sidemeat. I don't care about talking to you."

He didn't stumble. He didn't apologize. He felt like a boxer, closed-in against the ropes, keeping both arms pinned tight, swallowing the zinc that lit on his tongue. _Rope-a-dope_ : sag and let the bigger threat tire. He didn't want to see himself in Marcus's eye whites—scared, stiff, shell of toughness, thin as tissue-paper.

"You get one more shot," the Ductus warned him, a breath across Colton's face, and it smelled horrible, like flesh that rots in water, rocks on its feet, bobbing straight down to the summer silt.

"One more," he said again, "and I feed you to the wolves."


	72. To Collect the People

Ms. Woeburne's fingernails hit the table in swift, Morse code bursts.

" _No,"_ Sebastian said when she'd called him last night from the cramped back of a taxi. _"There's no real evidence. We cannot press charges, but I'm not prepared to start exonerating. Your promotion is official; I cannot rescind that; but I hope you won't worry. I won't have you out there again."_ The firmness of his tone surprised her. She'd not been egotistical enough to hope Mr. LaCroix might take action for her sake. It made S.W. breathe sharply in the cool leather seats of that getaway cab, clothing itching with burn marks, left hand holding shut the thick glass panel between herself and her driver. She did not argue with him.

" _I appreciate the dangers in which you placed yourself and the lengths to which you went to strike and maintain this agreement—I truly do—but as your Prince, I cannot permit you continue. I am removing you as attaché, cancelling the outreach forums, and, until further notice, I have opted to suspend the truce."_ In a handful of words and one order, Ms. Woeburne's ceasefire with the downtown Anarchs was over.

The Ventrue sat in that car with her palm over her solar plexus, smiling stupidly, feeling the bubbling of something like relief, and something else that tasted like failure.

" _What should I do next?"_ she'd asked, vowels tight, consonants sticking. The vehicle hit a pothole, making her stomach gurgle. She pinned the cell to an ear and a few fingers pulled at lightly singed scalp. There was a thin scythe of outside air pushing through the open window, just a crack; it was refreshingly, wonderfully cold.

" _Inform the local branch you will no longer be serving as an advocate. Use a proxy if you must. Do whatever you think is appropriate; I trust you will close this quickly. Please keep me updated, and do try to stay safe,"_ he told her, and hung up the telephone.

Morning passed without further disaster. Now Ms. Woeburne found herself sitting here—whacking ten digits into an empty corner table, located in some desolate coffee shop not far from _Club_ _Confession_ —waiting nervously for a jilted Baron to come stomping through the front door.

Well, he was going to be angry. There's just no getting around that. Angry, probably armed, and in no mood for a scot-free severance of an agreement the Camarilla had yet to pay out on. Knowing this, Ms. Woeburne almost brought a guard contingent, but ultimately decided they would only make it worse. Besides, her newfound political status prevented Rodriguez from harming her. She was no longer a titleless crony, and if he desired a fight from all this aftermath—that is, wanted someone to pay in the capital way—he'd assuredly look for someone else. "Someone else" isn't S.W.'s problem. Her problem is always right here.

Besides, she didn't think Nines Rodriguez would take a shot at her again, anyway. She didn't think he had the guts.

Ms. Woeburne banged her nails harder into the cheap wood, fiddling, listening for the over-door bell. It was a dismal little place, this. The almost-warm burgundy wallpaper had begun to crack around the vents; the window panes gathered cobwebs. One claustrophobic bar hugged the room's far side, backlit by neon bulbs and a lead-eaten mirror. The establishment couldn't support crowds even on its best days, part of why she chose it; a grand total of two patrons and an exhausted waiter kept her company. A dismal place, yes, but on the right street, in the right territory, a Camarilla-Anarch border zone. It was for tired, hungry strippers limping in for six AM breakfast; an occasional late-night beat cop; and unlucky out-of-towners who didn't know any better. Ms. Woeburne spoke to no one, and no one spoke to the apprehensive-looking exec with the battleship gray chesterfield and a persistent jiggle in her knee.

Nines hadn't wanted to meet her here; that much he made clear. And, you know, she couldn't entirely blame him, considering they'd just reestablished new contact terms. Those terms changed when her Audi exploded all over the parking lot, however—or so she explained on the telephone forty-five minutes ago. Rodriguez snorted and slammed down the receiver. Ms. Woeburne would've doubted he'd show were it not for another round of excessive threats she'd made: _This involves city security! This is not a trap! You will regret your cowardice!_ and blah-blah, what have you.

Besides, she had a nagging notion he already suspected what this conference was really about. There had been a distinct, particular chagrin to the way he smashed down that phone.

Well, here's hoping nobody tries to smash her.

Oh, Ms. Woeburne had covered all the bases just in case. She'd reported her itinerary to Prince LaCroix, notified her modest crew of assistants, invented a code red word and put a couple of better Foremen on call. There was Tom Genovese in an armed car dressed up like a moving van, AK on his lap, waiting three blocks down. She is perfectly aware of being Seneschal. Seneschals do not overestimate enemy party courtesy. And—as you'll see, if you follow her long enough, and you've picked up enough of Jyhad—it is usually possible to be somewhat confident without being completely stupid. She prepares for everything. It's foolish not to.

Ms. Woeburne took one more miserable look around the drab, boring scene, noted she ought to be smoking, and pushed out a sigh.

Seneschal LA unclicked her phone from her hip holster and placed it neatly upon the tabletop. She had two stored messages from an impatient Tremere visitor seeking Sebastian's audience; the other three were polite declarations of presence from vampires who would soon be passing through. S.W. had run the checks and double-checks, determined them to be valid, and gave them her formal permission to conduct business in the Los Angeles Domain, something that felt bizarrely officious, but who's kidding if she claims not to enjoy that? Mr. LaCroix hadn't commented on the reports his officer sent him, which left her to assume either the Prince wasn't too worried or that she'd done the right thing. Ms. Woeburne's going to go ahead and give herself the credit, if you don't mind. Give herself the pat on the back. I mean, nobody else is going to do it, and to be honest, she'd probably flinch if they did.

A good start. A fine swearing-in. She just had to maintain this act for, well, however long Sebastian required.

Or until someone finally succeeded in blowing her up. Whichever came first, really.

Ms. Woeburne swiveled her phone about with an index finger. This hanging around was getting her nerves—not that they needed any help—and she began to worry Rodriguez wasn't coming at all.

Her thought snapped short when the door jangled open, and a blond head popped in.

"Howdy," Kent-Alan said, winked at her, and slid into the chair across from Ms. Woeburne so smoothly it felt as if she'd arranged this meeting with him.

The Ventrue stared at her unwanted tablemate for a moment, unblinking, trying to formulate a polite _what-in-the-fuck_.

The moseying, idly-go, lank-limbed Anarch grinned lazily at her. He'd pulled the seat out and spun it around for good show before plunking down. Beachy, boyish tumbleweed of Toreador. His arms claimed the table—bunched up corduroy sleeves, riotous orange, a size too small for him—and Seneschal LA thought about shoving them off, but she is supposed to be diplomatic. She is supposed to be civil.

Her displeasure intensified the longer he sat and the longer she stared, and, for a sore fifteen seconds, the Seneschal of Los Angeles wondered very seriously if this was Mr. Rodriguez's way of standing her up.

Stood up by a displaced Baron? Oh, like hell.

"What, please tell me, am I supposed to do with this?" Woeburne asked, lips pursed, one brow arched halfway up her forehead.

The Anarch thunked an elbow onto the table and leaned forward, sleeve stretching, chin propped in hand. "Me? You, m'lady, can do anything you'd like." Ms. Woeburne did not smile back. "Afraid it's all business tonight, Seneschal. But don't count me out. Who knows? I might be more useful than you think."

S.W. was skeptical, not that this was an unusual state. The snaps upon her gray coat threw lampshine about in an intimidating way. "How could you possibly be of any use to me?"

"I'm glad you asked," Kent whistled, rapping a palm against the wood. He was shifty, now that she took a closer look. Though the Toreador had come strolling in with slack, sloppy joints and a carefree expression, his copper-coin eyes were moving in a familiar, take-apart way. They darted about the place—skimmed corners, roved walls, and poked shadow. _Inventory_ —she recognized it. Bangs skirted his brow, yellow and too happy to be genuine. "There are plenty of things I can do for you. Not like _that_. Ew, gross. You're so bad," the Toreador continued. He was now cataloguing the curtained stairwell behind Ms. Woeburne, but his efforts at distracting her failed. She didn't care enough to be outraged; she was only moderately pissed-off. "Hey, should I have brought a résumé? That's the sort of thing you suits like, isn't it? Do you think we could just chat? Informal interview. Tell me: what _motivates_ you, Seneschal? What makes Ms. Woeburne tick?"

The Ventrue's gaze was flatter than a sheet of contact paper. "I'm going to ask you one more time," she said. She did not have to say about what.

Kent-Alan blinked. He was doing well, actually. It is not the usual Anarch that can sit across from a Patrician—look into her snake eyes and see her small, flossed teeth—and not start to sweat under his collar. "Oh, I'm just here to inspect the place a bit," he told her, sliding easily through his smile. "You know. Make sure you aren't pulling a fast one. I'm a frontrunner—that's what I am. Are those new boots, by the way? Because they are very flattering. There's nice legs and then there's nice legs, but you, Seneschal, have got some truly legendary calves."

"Is that so."

"Would I lie to you?"

"Let me save you some time. I will not," Woeburne declared, a LaCroix ultimatum, "discuss business with you. If the Baron isn't here in the next half hour, I will stand up and walk out of this building. Are we understood?"

"Maybe I'm more like a satellite," he pondered, and S.W. debated whether or not she should simply pick up her foot and stomp the boy's toe.

"If you think I am going to wait on you people, you're sorely, sorely mistaken. You are off your fucking trolley. You have got another thing coming." A stiff threat, well-enunciated, canines touching behind the darkness of her mouth. "You have thirty minutes. Go."

Kent-Alan snickered happily at her.

"I love the way you talk," he mused. The hand that had been pillowing his jaw moved to his collar and flipped it outwards. "Don't you love the way she talks?"

There was a wire taped down to the flap.

"Gets on my nerves," the Baron muttered and shouldered in, letting the door bang shut behind him.

Rodriguez didn't make eye contact right away. He was scowling, though, as he approached the table where she and Kent-Alan sat, plain-as-day, touching his jacket pockets, as though to double-check, remind himself something was there. Ms. Woeburne really didn't need to ask, so she didn't. She stayed right where she was, back straight, blinking soberly, a little bit scowly herself. It was hardly the meeting S.W. asked for. There was a second soldier who followed him in—a teenager, my god, what else—some redhead in a pom-pom tuque with a rather obvious sawed-off in her backpack and a pistol in her pants, who sneered happily at everything, and at the Seneschal, too.

"You sent a decoy. Excessive. Oddly enough, I'd thought we'd gotten past all this," Ms. Woeburne said, displeased, removing her arms from the table as Rodriguez exchanged places with his lackey. The Ventrue felt genuinely put out by this go-between. She watched Nines thump into the chair and scoot loudly backwards, remembering their meeting in Good Samaritan, suddenly feeling like she should have brought an entourage, thinking herself a little bit open and a little bit small. The Anarch's expression was an indecipherable shade of disgruntled. There was nothing friendly about him—all restlessness, overarching disapproval, his black coat stiff around the armpits, like he'd worn bulletproof underneath. It was a scene that smacked of regression. Ms. Woeburne hates regression. She does not like one step forward, two steps back.

"You tell me," he barked, arms crossing, making the leather look even more kevlarish. Kent-Alan was standing by with that same irksome grin on his pretty face. She noted the contour of a .38 pressing against the Toreador's green t-shirt. The pom-pom teenager hovered, still with that sick-puppy, eat-shit grin. "Saw your fuckboy on the corner of West Fourteenth. Looked like he got a flat. He was pissed."

 _Damn it, Tom_ , she thought, but didn't show it on her best face. "You can't blame me for that," S.W. said, lacing her fingers on her thigh, stopping the jiggling—and eyeing, accidentally, the emergency button on her cellular phone. "I'm a political target. I've got a faction after my head."

"Well, _hell_ , senator! I can't imagine how hard that must be on you."

It was a little unfortunate, and that hostile sarcasm was a little, all right, deserved, and Ms. Woeburne was about to say _you know what I meant_ , but before that could happen, the Toreador clicked his tongue. "Hey, hey, the gang's all here," Kent-Alan sang.

Rodriguez was scowling at a spot on the floor. He dismissed his deputy with a grunt. "Don't go far."

"Course not," Playboy promised. "C'mon, then, Quebec. Let's hit some crosswords."

He pointed the teenager to a bar stool, and when she turned, you could see a patch sewed into the back of her jeans; it was a smiley face, a stuck-out tongue. The backpack landed with a metallic jangle at her feet. Then the Toreador swiveled around, too, sauntering to a booth hugging the door. Good view of the place, Woeburne noted solely to herself; good view, straight shot out the front window, both ways down the street. Those jumpy brown eyes were working, making wide clockwork sweeps. She is not the only preparer in Los Angeles. She is not the only one who suspects she may have to take everything apart.

Ms. Woeburne was very suddenly and very poignantly tired. She rubbed thoughtlessly at her eyes, pushing mascara into them and blinking it away.

"Your people owe me information," Rodriguez huffed at her, leaning forward and then back, crossing and uncrossing his arms.

"That's—" The wince and crinkle of disloyal Ventrue smile. "—not why I'm here."

" _Oh_?" he said, perilously unsurprised.

"You must be wondering why I've called you like this," the Seneschal began, drawing up her prewritten script and deciding it all tasted like shit. "Before I proceed, I do want to say that I'm sorry about it. Matters peanuts to you, I'm sure, but there it is. You have to understand that my position has changed dramatically. I don't mean to imply anything, or make you think I'm withholding something. But that's just it. I don't know." S.W. bit her cheek. "I don't know what to believe at the moment, and that's why I've had to call you here to tell you what I'm going to tell you."

Rodriguez glared at her as though he already knew what Woeburne was about to say.

"The incident last week," she went on, pitching that start into the wastebasket, cutting to the chase. "The Camarilla would like it to call an isolated incident. But, considering the circumstances. That is, bearing in mind my recent promotion." One contrite Ventrue _ahem-hm_. "Like you, I err on the side of caution. Don't mistake me; the Sabbat won't discriminate, obviously, and I'm not suggesting you're somehow liable for what they do, but. Taking it all into account." She fidgeted, clearing her throat again, swallowing it, frustrated with the entire affair, and experiencing not a small edge of embarrassment, too. "It's just that the timing was very convenient. You can't deny. And, given that, and given my role, it's not appropriate to take risks. Not without—"

"Hold on," the Baron groused from beneath that glower of his, prickly and disbelieving, brow low. "I know you aren't trying to point your finger at me after all this."

"You brought me there," she reminded him, tongue sour.

"To negotiate. On your invitation."

"To lecture me about your public image. Should I be satisfied with that? Would you." The Ventrue's hands clenched around her seat. "Look at this from our position. You've been a short-lived neighbor to us. And this only now, only because we're containing a mutual enemy. I'm aware the Sabbat endanger you, obviously. Me, too. I would never try to suggest you were working with them. But there are possibilities a politician in my position has to prepare for. Who's to say you didn't let—"

"Wait just a fucking minute. I PULLED YOUR WORTHLESS ASS OFF THE GOD DAMNED PARKING LOT." The chair legs screeched forward. She leant back. The Brujah was bristling already, teeth pressed together, sharp ones stretching just to the edge of his top lip.

"Yes, I was there," Ms. Woeburne agreed. There was a lingering sting in her forearms from where the window glass had burrowed in. They itched beneath long sleeves.

"So what? Fuck diplomacy. Close up shop. Leave 'em, sink or swim. Because, according to your cabinet, maybe it 'might' have helped me out? That's fair. And look how nice it works out for you snakes. Then what," the Anarch asked, aggression in his flippancy, one eyebrow taking a threatening arch. He leaned forward. It read like a threat, like he was a single disappointment from boiling over."You let me fry for the next Cam operation they raze? Maybe helped me out? Is that Objective C?"

"I already assured you that wouldn't be the case. We aren't pressing this issue. Not through official channels, and not through—"

"Look at me. Do you really think I give a fuck about your official channels? Let me remind you something—something less about maybes and more about making it out in one piece. You almost got blown to bits last week. Not LaCroix. Not your organization. You. Do you really think this is a good time to lose my vote, Woeburne? Is that really the move you want to make?"

Her voice went low; her eyes crinkled unpleasantly, the weak color of dry sage. "Do you _really_ think I'm relying on Anarch support."

It was not the right thing to say. She could watch the comment leave her mouth, register on Nines's face, drop the temperature twenty degrees. He stared at her. There was a pause. The look was blank; the temper roiled beneath it, blackening thin ice.

Woeburne took a lungful of oxygen. She handed out company condolences. "This is not meant to be a punishment. It's just that the agreement no longer suits our interests, so the Board has elected to terminate it. We understand why you might be upset—"

"Great," the Brujah chuffed. His fists formed on the table, long after she had removed hers. S.W. could see his nostrils flare.

"But what you need to keep in perspective is—"

"That's just FUCKING great, Woeburne. Just like a fucking Ventrue," Rodriguez snarled, anger coming unstitched. "You go running off and leave my people in the bear pit. Because you can't deal with the—"

The Seneschal's conclusion was cold, but it was accurate. "You did the exact same thing in my position. It is preemptory. You should understand what that means."

His response was the dull 'BAM' of both fists crashing onto the table.

"Sorry, ma'am. Are you having a problem?" Ms. Woeburne glanced up to see the pimply young waiter standing behind her with an ominous wine bottle in one hand.

"No. Thank you," she told him, knowing that he'd absolutely no inkling of what she'd just saved him from. He gave Nines an uneasy glimpse before wandering back to the bar.

S.W. took a final deep, bracing, no-leeway breath. The Ventrue's hands were spidered across her thighs, worrying fabric; she tightened her lips. "We should cut this short. I'm not sure what more I ought to say to you, but I hope—"

"You don't need to say jack shit to me, you ungrateful Camarilla bitch," he spat, stood up, and everything lurched to a stop.

Ms. Woeburne saw the windows shatter before she heard the shot.

Machineguns; has to be; can't be anything else, the way the glass folded in, like cake batter. Here comes the jingle-bell pandemonium of a thousand pieces bouncing on cement. Bullets crippled the front of the place, punching holes and shredding wood. Liquid glugging from behind the counter; exploding bottles; foamy, splinters, too much mess. The Seneschal had no time to cover her ears as she watched, in suspended animation, chunks of cushion blown from furniture and mirrors crashing off walls. Blood splatter; Formica, flying; bursting lamps. Nines upended their table and leapt to the far side of it, too thin to be much cover, but enough time to let them scatter. He ended up behind the thick oak bar. Through no conscious action, Ms. Woeburne found herself halfway across the room, pressed in the kitchen threshold, ducking for cover.

She might've called for help. Except she didn't have her phone. It had gone flying when the Brujah flipped the table, and who knows where; Tom must hear the gunfire, surely; he wouldn't ignore something like that. It mowed the venue stamp-flat in a matter of seconds. Yeehaw, S.W. thought, almost laughing at the ridiculousness of being shot at so extravagantly— _shoot-out at the saloon!_ —but there was a bitter _zing_ registering along her bicep. MP5s railed at them for another solid half-minute. She couldn't exactly attend to it. A shell glanced off the waiter's head, colliding with his right socket, scuttling bone and eye matter vertically midair. The other few kine had been plowed over ages ago. I mean, Ms. Woeburne was a bit, you know, preoccupied to count corpses, but the red on the floor was too much for one body. Much too much color on the hardwood and tile. The Ventrue's right foot slipped on it, and she glanced down to find herself standing in a pool of decaf. Really, she thought. This is a hazard. Someone should clean this up.

Really, she thought, again, at herself.

Again, she thought.

Ms. Woeburne must have laughed. She must have. The thing was too misfortunate. A bomb in her Audi and now the Sabbat or whoever are spraying into a bloody coffee bar. I can't believe this. Why in the hell does this always happen to me. I should have brought that posse. Well this settles it, once-and-for-all—I am never running Sebastian's bipartisan errands again—not without a regiment behind me—I can't be expected to work like this—

Fingers mindlessly gripping her stricken arm, S.W. slid down the doorframe, realizing she'd gone deaf. She looked at her wound, finally; it oozed, smelled like tar, and a fragment of bright metal was buried in it. She looked at the minced sleeve of her chesterfield. She looked over at Nines, hiding behind his makeshift barricade; he looked back at her, expression bizarrely clear through the crossfire. No, no, she thought, looking down where cases lolled in the disaster—this is some sort of adrenaline thing—there is certainly no way these shells are moving so slowly. They would tumble, hop, plink. She could see individual dust motes hanging. Ms. Woeburne expected her bullet hole ought to start hurting pretty soon, and felt a needle-point of aggravation, knowing the suspense was probably worse than the pain. It wasn't that bad. It wasn't that bad, really. She watched a chair blasted into wood chips. She flinched.

Then the gunners either ran out of ammunition or time, because the firing stopped, tires squealed outside, and then stillness.

It wasn't quite reality. Not yet, no—it was not one-hundred-percent. It wasn't her first battle. It was, though, the first time S. Woeburne had ever been shot. Her limb was a muddle of sensory confusion and dead, slack-jawed nerves. She didn't feel a thing. She wasn't even afraid—there was just no time, you see—not to panic, not to ponder losing her lunch.

"Woeburne! Shit. Ms. Woeburne—are you in there?" – Tom Genovese, braking hard, falling out of his hobbling truck, submachine in his hand, high-stepping over the broken glass.

Still grabbing the wound, reeling, Seneschal LA pushed herself upright along the doorframe.

"Tom," she answered, sounding strained, clearing her throat, stepping lamely into the gutted main room. Oh thank god. Litter crunched under her heels. Her knee was not working properly. It was not working. She could not get it right. "Yes. Yes, I'm here. I'm right here."

She stopped to stare. There was no trace of them, save for the shotgun skittered out across the floor. And for the ragged orange corduroy dangling in Rodriguez's hand, sifting ash. It looked like a pasta strainer. It was bright, bright red.

Ms. Woeburne didn't say anything. She couldn't think of anything to do.

He dropped the jacket when Tom made it through the door, though, a flat black dress shoe kicking in what was left of the splintery glass pane. Poor Tom! Coming to retrieve her, finding that sawed-off hefted at his face; the Brujah stood up tall, barked _freeze, fucker—_ like a real cop, the bona fide town sheriff, and it made Ms. Woeburne want to tell him so, made her want to share the joke. "Stop it," she said instead. Tom held up his hands, including the gun. Slick, dark hair, combed apart in the back, bit old-fashioned, bit of an agency man; silly tie, American flag; he was only coming to collect his people. Her people, thank god. "Stop it; put it down; he's one of mine," she said.

Rodriguez flicked a dubious look at the Ventrue from one corner of his eye, but when he saw her, and S.W. found this a little odd at the time, but didn't realize why, he seemed startled. The muzzle dropped. A little. Ms. Woeburne said good man. Good job, she said, and breathed out, but the breath never felt like it stopped coming. Fine, it's fine, it's fine now, she said. Be calm it's going to be fine.

Nines said: honey you are full of lead.

She tried to pick up the unshot arm and wave it off—indicate that she was all right, it was nothing too terrible—but her troublesome leg buckled, then. She looked down, and saw the second bullet, wedged there, a neat hole through the back of her thigh, not far from where the smiley patch had been on that dead teenager's pants. And she saw the third, fourth, fifth one: _bangbangbang_! right through her kidney, or where it should-have-would-have been. There was dripping puddle of blood.

"I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine," the Seneschal insisted. But Tom took one look, hooked an elbow under her leg, picked her up, and carried her out—and—with the foreign objects in her body and her head lolling, forward-back, the breath-out still coming, still leaving, her arms around his neck, her city, her people, Ms. Woeburne didn't get a chance to look back.

She closed her eyes and she slept for a while. Just a little while, you understand.


	73. Rainy Day

_I am not a man of blood; and God is my witness that in all my wars I have never been the aggressor, and that my enemies have always been the authors of their own calamity._

_\- Timur_

* * *

 

"No," he said.

"No, you misunderstand me. I make no such assumptions. I, for one, am not a fan of hearsay, Regent. But when I accepted this position, I made Los Angeles a guarantee. My guarantee: consistent, decisive leadership. I promised that, above all else, we would not continue with the incessant wavering that has bogged down this Domain. We would not encourage fickle juries. I will not waste your time or my Sheriff's on witch hunts. Rest assured, however, I will deal with these problems in my own way. Yes. That is correct. Have a good night, Regent," Sebastian LaCroix said, hung up the telephone, and leant forward in his high-backed office chair.

It was very quiet in Venture Tower's penthouse for the next minute. Quietness—a novelty, these nights. Across his lofty and polished chamber, the red furniture stood silent, sullen, unoccupied. The whites and royal golds were unpunctuated by paranoid Primogen, the usual discordant company Prince Los Angeles found himself entertaining; the floors were unscuffed; the corners were spacious, clean, and echoing. The tall windows at his back were uncurtained and open to a cloudy May evening. The candles, unlit. Electricity-fed fire lapped steadily in its wire cage. Above him, the daunting chandelier was surprisingly, pleasingly still: its crystals did not twirl; its heavy chain did not sway. The desk wore no fingerprints. For Sebastian LaCroix, tonight was a quiet one, indeed.

He looked outside—and outside looked, purposively, like rain.

The Ventrue mulled over his telephone call for a moment, long fingers interlacing beneath his delicate chin.

Things were not going exactly as planned, but some pieces had fallen into place nicely, and that would have to do.

LaCroix finished the thought, tapped a fountain pen on his desktop, and picked up the receiver. With one forefinger, he punched in a series of numbers.

"I just heard," he said when a curt, polite male voice answered her telephone. Sebastian's carefully measured its level of concern. His eyebrows dented towards a sharp nose. "Is she all right? Is she able to talk?"

"One moment, Prince," the male voice said—neat, polished, friendly in a company way. "I'll ask her."

" _Yes, yes; of course I am; what a stupid question; give me the phone,"_ scrabbled a woman in the background, unmistakably Ms. Woeburne.

She answered _sir_.

"Good lord, Ms. Woeburne, are you all right? Tell me where you are," he said, said—sympathy a touch melodramatic, perhaps, "and I will send someone for you."

" _Yes. Yes, I'm fine. I'm fine."_ She swore it twice, tone taut, confirming this fact to herself. He imagined her: lids crinkled, nose winkled, face lockjawed with poor attempts to look collected. _"I'm with Tom Genovese at Safehouse D-C, Skyeline Apartments. You don't need to send anyone. He was in the area when word went out and came to intercept. He was very good—very quick to respond. I've been taken care of. I should be up on my feet by the morning. Tomorrow night, at the latest. I'm doing well. I'm fine."_

You may think he is impervious to weakness and oblivious to others, but you are incorrect. Sebastian LaCroix can hear the pain. He can hear it in her voice. It is stiff, and prickly, but it catches at the edges—she breathes through her teeth—its cadence is just a little too high, suggesting, among other things, tears.

"I see. I shall extend Mr. Genovese my personal commendation once this is dealt with." (Untrue. Genovese was an astonishingly mediocre mind with no business in the upper circles of his administration.) "But be honest with me, please. I can't have you limping about. You are my representative; I want recovered before you step into the court again," he pressed once more, just for convincingness's sake.

" _Oh, no. Nonononononono. I wouldn't do that. I'm not—it's that—I'm better now. I'm doing better. Really. I've had,"_ she admitted, _"a little morphine."_

One professional blood doll sprawled in the tub, needle tracks in her wrist, a large bonus already written into the crisp Foundation check. This is all it takes to keep a corporal from screaming.

" _Dilaudid,"_ Tom said from the lounge chair across from her blood-sopped couch.

"I've already contacted Hollywood to interrogate them. I understand our Anarch associates also escaped in more or less one piece."

The Seneschal tongued her lips, swallowing audibly. There was a flicker of hesitation. _"No, not exactly. Two causalities, at least. Rodriguez survived. I don't think he was hit. I don't think there were any witnesses. They were killed. I think they were. I'm—I'm not sure just what happened on that front,"_ she confessed, aheming nervously, trying to save face, unsure how humiliated she ought to be. _"I was distracted."_

" _You passed out,"_ Tom said, incidentally, from the background. Ms. Woeburne told him, unkindly, _shhh_.

"I'm sure. Abrams would have been in a very different mood if he'd lost his muzzled dog. You did well," he told her, ambiguously, though Ms. Woeburne sounded like she did not believe him. "I'm pleased you're safe."

" _It was… it happened very fast,"_ she explained, like this was some sort of excuse, a mitigating circumstance that would appease him when Sebastian was already appeased. _"I didn't get a visual. On the attack. I was shot. In my arm. Left bicep. I'm sorry."_

"That's too bad, but as I said, I am relieved you are safe," he assured her.

" _It's just my arm,"_ she swore, again.

Tom said: _Oh, is that all._

The explosion last night was of Sabbit origins—of this, Prince Los Angeles had little doubt—but these origins could be traced, most certainly, to the Anarch brand of wiliness. They were by far the most likely culprits, at any rate; alternatives were possible, but too convenient, and just a little too coincidental to be believed. He would know.

You could line up the list of encounters well enough, like beads on a war map, if not quite predict the next one: Leopold attacks on Santa Monican soil, Giovanni coups, an ill-timed encounter on Interstate 10 that unfortunately ended in ruckus rather than appealing Blood Hunt material. But _coincidence_?

"No," he had said. Not a coincidence at all.

Coincidence is a fatty, satisfying, unhealthy meat only fools like the Toreador are complacent enough to eat. Brujah are foolish—frankly, stupid—but they are not complacent. The disenfranchised Baron had multiple reasons to stage an assassination: to frame the Sabbat before they did the same to him, to fake his own set-up, to let loose a rallying cry that would stimulate support, possibly to garner sanction for a march against Hollywood. Or it was always possible he simply sought to send a message by eliminating LA's new Seneschal. Vainglory, this strain of Anarch. Inflated, showy gestures; common man heroics; crass, imprudent charm. And plenty of car bombs. Perhaps he'd had them rig the vehicle himself, or perhaps he merely dropped hints for a passing Ductus. Frankly, it didn't matter which. Sebastian has a message of his own.

No, you will not. No, you cannot. _No, not_ are his words of power in this Domain.

The Sabbat/Anarch confrontations came at an all too ideal time, truly. They are a moderate inconvenience—a threat to commerce that makes businessmen nervous—but that is all. Let the hounds at one another's throats; they'd puff up, start frothing, and lunge for blood at the drop of a pin. Pit them against each other, and viola—no further suspects needed. Any bloodshed during this warfare could now be attributed to either sect, and the opposite arm would believe it, wouldn't they? Any disposed-of lieutenants or dead spokesmen; any building set afire; any edifice shot-down. Anything not to be blamed. Anything not to incur a top-down wrath. Anything for a little hero-credit and a little victim indignation—a little wounded, vicious pride.

The Camarilla has no part but to mediate. The Camarilla will do what it must to keep the city whole.

Surprising that some Sabbat footman had overheard the name _Ankaran Sarcophagus_. Perhaps Ms. Mira was in need of a lecture on discretion. It did not worry him overmuch, though, for the pathetic local branches could not damage his estates in a lasting way—and, furthermore, when Sabbat get worked up over something, it sort of discredits others who might. No one wants to be floated away in the same boat as those crackpots. No one would like to share leg room with terrorists and deviants of the very worst kind.

No.

No.

No.

No.

You cannot blame him if, after so much necessary no, he appreciates hearing only the word _yes_.

_Yes, sir_ , to be precise. It is a reassuring phrase—perhaps somewhat arrogant of him to enjoy as much as he does, but this is a creature comfort, not a vain pleasure. It is a promise that modernity has not completely eclipsed self-sufficiency, or order, or the recognition of a status he has not been freely given but has earned through great hardship. Yes, Sebastian would have been irritated had sharpshooters gunned his current Childe down in Chicago; if those beats were even aware of Ms. Woeburne's lineage is a less sure thing. Securing mediocrity and obedience enough to make one's clerk his Seneschal in such a tenuous Domain is no small feat. And Prince LaCroix was not even nervous about it. He had done a decent job with her, if he may say so—and she has not been his star pupil, though he means no offense.

Perhaps it was not so much a lie. She has done well in her appointed roles. She's done, if you will, _just_ _fine_.

Sebastian LaCroix does not appreciate games, but there is only one in Los Angeles, and he will play it with every asset and every good soldier he has.

No, he does not _want_ Ms. Woeburne to die, not specifically.

Is he willing to sacrifice her? Oh, yes. It would be irresponsible to place any one corporal over the business of running a city he has made a promise to.

When circumstances arise where you must be friends with an enemy, and those circumstances begin to go dry, you have different choices. Wait as long as you think it wise, he supposes, but be ready to take the first blow. You should always preempt it. You slip an adder in their basket, or you simply turn around, aim your rifle, and blow a hole through the back of their head.

He is willing to return to the original plan.

Sometimes you are able to obliterate a problem. Others, you must eradicate it, step-by-step, an extermination-by-number. If closing the Free-State in Los Angeles had been easy, some enterprising youngster would've delivered the few remaining heads to his doorstep long ago. The Don would not have died. You can see, then, that Prince LaCroix is capable of a degree of patience. He does not always send in the cavalry straight out of the barn. He can bide his time and consider the Best Possible of All Solutions. He can learn from watching his small, irritated rivals prod at the Childe he has baited them with, just like a boy pokes at a rattlesnake he suspects is dead. This boy is confident, but cannot afford to be complacent—never that. Not yet, at any rate. Not until he is absolutely sure.

Sebastian paused, allowing Ms. Woeburne and her irrelevant attendant to argue amongst themselves, giving them time to peek under the bandages wrapped around her stomach and decide she ought to drink something else. She spoke clearly, enunciating every syllable, but there was a skitter to the words. They did not quite lie flat.

"Do you want to come in, Ms. Woeburne?" he asked, a courteous offer, not entirely useful to someone currently ruining the upholstery with gunshot blood. "I can make an opening for you."

It is a little more like the manner in which they used to convene, this—before he made a threat of how much she has apparently disappointed him. That, too, smoke and mirrors, a bit of a feint. Twice now Ms. Woeburne has placed their administration beyond reproof when bullets began to fly, and made a show of Princely tolerance for lesser factions. He planned on telling the girl one day. One day, when he thought she could absorb it. If she was still around.

His cards were placed; his cups were poisoned; his dagger was beneath the table, ready to be torn away and used.

" _No,"_ Ms. Woeburne said—she could occasionally manage it, you see: no, n-o, the negative, _I will not_ —her mouth pursed, her fingers folded tightly, narcotics slipping, her mind recalibrating into something worthy of a new office in the City of LA. He could tell how badly she would have liked to scuttle back to a place with tall, unshakeable walls. But it would not do. It would not earn her the kind of esteem she so needed to keep moving, to go on. _"I'm all right. I am. I'll stay put for a night, then I'll go home. Not home as in home—I mean, I'll be back to my apartment. It's secure. Secure enough. I'll be fine. I'll get it sorted out and see if I can't scrape together a better account of what happened for you."_

"I would appreciate that, but—as I said—do not overexert yourself." This was not a lie; if, for whatever reason, Prince LaCroix's new Seneschal was dubbed unfit in her station, the Primogen would petition to replace her. They were less than pleased about such a nepotistic appointment. No one, though, was surprised. Sebastian could not abide anyone else in this office. He would not permit some Board-appointed busybody nosing about in his personal affairs, leaking documents from the Antiquities Department, or turning about his plans for this Domain.

" _I won't,"_ she promised—again, again, and again. _"I'm fine. A little time. I'm really going to be fine."_

"I'm glad to hear it, Ms. Woeburne. Oh, and—before you burden yourself with reports, I ought to mention that Beckett called this evening. He will be leaving Chicago and is due around eight o'clock on the tenth. I'd like for you, personally, to pick him up at the airport."

" _Oh. Yes. Of course I will. Not a problem. I'll organize a security attachment and clear my night."_

The Prince lifted his pen to scratch out a brief note for Ms. Lefevre. "Excellent. I will have Beckett's flight number and living arrangements passed to you. All complimentary—I'm sure they will suffice. But, naturally, you are to take our guest wherever he'd like."

" _I'd be glad to, Mr. LaCroix. Except—I'll need a car,"_ she reminded him, embarrassed.

"Ah. Yes, of course. I'll send Joelle out to buy you a new one tonight." (He had forgotten this niggling detail, the initial destruction. He had not anticipated that one. It had not been a block of his plan.) "She'll drop it off in your parking space and leave the keys with the lobby clerk. Is there a particular make or color you prefer?"

" _Not really, no,"_ she stammered, an inane courtesy that caught its recipient off-guard. He had never bothered asking her before. _"Four wheels will do."_

"That's what I admire about you, Seneschal: easy to please. I'll tell her to get you a Jaguar."

_"Well—it's just—you don't need to make a—"_

"Take care, Ms. Woeburne," Mr. LaCroix said, and sat down the receiver.

He adjusted his tie, unfastened his cufflinks, rebuttoned, and tilted back in the imposing black chair.

May. Early May, and outside: gray clouds deepened into murky spring, a deep-night, clamshell blue. The temperature continued to rise. Wind pushed into windowsills. The fireplace was still popping away. Rain, rain, rain.

Sebastian LaCroix sat alone in his office. The sarcophagus sat in an empty room below him, old stone gathering dust in the dark.


	74. Good Hospitality

The first thing Beckett saw, when he rounded the deboarding line and stepped out into Terminal 21C, was a wildly waving hand.

"Beckett! Beckett, over here," Ms. Woeburne was calling, springing up from behind the back of a waiting room chair and click-clacking rapidly over to where he stood. The Gangrel grimaced around his smile and greeted Seneschal LA with a dipped hat and a nod. Her heels were astonishingly loud against the tile, suit dark above scuffed white linoleum, stride overeager and rushed. The Ventrue shouldered through a mass of commuters to salute him.

"Hello," she was saying, grinning, forcibly upbeat, grabbing for his hand. It crunched limply in the Seneschal's oppressive shake.

She'd come up in the world since they'd last met, but he saw no real difference; her eyes were racing pitter-patter, and the confidence seemed staged. "Hello and welcome. Welcome to our city. Mr. LaCroix can't wait to speak with you face-to-face. How was your flight? May I take that for you?"

Beckett shifted his bag to keep it away from the grasping fingers. She took a hint, stepped out of his personal space, and then suddenly noticed he was not traveling alone.

"Oh," the Seneschal said, nonplussed, backpedaling, trying to determine whether or not this spelled trouble for her report. A dark lock loose from her short tail bounced behind one ear. "I'm sorry," she told the elderly man in the button-up vest. He blinked, barraged by that new-fangled Ventrue enthusiasm, arthritic hands smoothing down his worn windbreaker. "I didn't even see you there. My name is Ms. Woeburne. With the LaCroix Foundation. I'm here to pick you up."

"This is Dr. Ingvar Johansen." Beckett gestured to the owlish academic. They were an odd and disturbing pair in the crowded airport: an eerie figure in a long coat followed closely by one tottering, balding historian. Ingvar Johansen did not appear to be afraid of the vampire—not openly, at least. There was a bewildered air about him, however, that went beyond age, jet lag, or a late night. He was helpless. He was vaguely aware of this fact, too, and so clung fast to the Gangrel's listless shadow, permitting himself to be led because there was no other option. "He's a friend of mine and an expert on Assyrian culture. Doctor, Ms. Woeburne."

Ms. Woeburne's urbane young face crinkled cheerfully, though it was obvious the unannounced tagalong had derailed her script. You could see in that wrinkle and that stare she was wondering exactly how much this human knew. "I see. Well, far be it from me to turn down an expert opinion. Excellent. In fact. Pleased to meet you. Thank you for coming," she said, and shook Johansen's knotty hand. "Any friend of Beckett's is a friend of mine."

"Likewise." The voice was shaky, Norwegian, and theatrical. He turned to the Gangrel with bleary wonder in watery, grayish eyes. "You certainly have a lot of friends, Beckett."

"Ms. Woeburne is the daughter of a client," the Gangrel said, and she looked a bit crestfallen at this disclosure, a downgrade from "friend." Beckett gazed neutrally at them both over tinted glasses. His sleek ponytail did not hide the unexcited expression beneath the akubra brim. "Once you passed me those files, I put Ingvar in touch with the Giovanni excavation team—sent him along with my personal recommendation. And he was as instrumental as I said he'd be. Now that the fieldwork is complete, Dr. Johansen has courteously offered to assist me in further research. I was hoping we might drop him off at the Empire Arms before proceeding to our meeting."

The Seneschal's response was excessively positive, so you could be certain she was faking it. Grin and bear it, small Ventrue; grit your smiling teeth. "Of course. Do you have any luggage? I can run over and—"

"Ingvar was smart enough to have his bags mailed," Beckett interjected. His human associate blinked again, harried, lost, unable to disagree.

"Oh. All right. Follow me to the garage, then," Ms. Woeburne announced, her natural directorial mode. "I didn't park far."

She led them through the corridor, down an escalator, past a cramped concession area and into the elevator, stride swift and on-target. The airport lights were glaring against a dark Californian sky and whitewashed plaster. Ms. Woeburne seemed unaffected by them—she was accustomed to the blast of pristineness, of sterility—but Dr. Johansen looked troubled. The man's arms shook in too-short coat sleeves. He was tired, disorientated, a dependant. He was old and hadn't had dinner. The two Kindred were aware of this, and they did not abuse it, but were not exactly accommodating. As the lift doors opened to the car lot, Seneschal LA flipped out her keys. She showed no signs of slowing down, even as the Ventrue began speaking to the nervous old man.

"Actually, I'm staying at Empire Hotel, too, Doctor," Ms. Woeburne told him, glancing up at the numbered colonnades, counting down to her own. Beckett was not amiss to the three dismal-looking black-ties that stepped out of a service ramp seconds later. They'd been looming along after them since LaCroix's gofer said hello. Camarilla bodyguards—they try to be inconspicuous, poor saps, and fall just this much short of success. He watched them linger by the doorway, shooting inhospitable expressions about, tapping at their earpieces, touching pockets full of guns. Beckett tossed them a blithe little wave. They did not wave back.

"Suite 3B," the Seneschal added. "If you ever need anything, please don't hesitate to knock on my door. I'm a little busy. I'll be glad to assist you if I can."

She brought them to a black Jaguar that smelled like fresh wax and aerosol. Ms. Woeburne fought with handle-and-key a few tugs before managing to get the passenger side unhinged and open. She could not seem to focus on it. There were too many dark corners, too many unoccupied vans. Her attention scattered; her shoulders were pent; her heart pushed at the roof of her mouth. "After you, please. Please."

She was limping, just a little—hard to notice—but there it was—and Beckett did.

Johansen scrambled into her backseat before anyone else could claim it, strapping down his belt as though expecting Ms. Woeburne would peel out of the garage. (Granted, he didn't _know_ Ms. Woeburne, and so couldn't have known fear is sensible reaction to overworked Ventrue behind a wheel. She wasn't about to say anything.) Beckett sighed, swung himself into the passenger chair, and hooked his hat on one knee.

One more jangling of keys, a brief fight with a stubborn clutch, and Seneschal LA started it up. Then they were out—and moving forward—and into the thoroughfare, though LAX, toward the city where angels walk.

The dramatic blue bulbs, the silly architecture, the airport arches all swept by the sports car and disappeared behind them in a matter of minutes. Woeburne's foot was, now that you mention it, a bit heavy on the pedal; her lane changes pressed shoulders into upholstery, lurched chests into seatbelts. The glossy XFR was past a toll booth and zooming onto I-10 before any further conversation took place.

"Have you," she began, an attempt to be light. Ingvar looked at her with his pale creased face. He was a boy here—brilliant, but trapped, ambiguously, in a way he could not quite put his finger on. "Been to the West Coast before? Not that I've been living here very long myself. I moved about a year ago. From London . Most recently. Leeds, originally. I schooled on the East Coast, though it's an entirely different animal, isn't it. Bit of a messy accent, I know. Too many cities in too few years. But I suppose I'm a full-time Yank now. LA is awful in the summer—that's what I can't get used to. Very hot. It's a sticky heat, is what it is. But you've got to be sweltering, anyway, Beckett, having wintered in Chicago. Would anyone like me to crack a window?"

"Are we being followed?" Dr. Johansen was wide-eyed, twisting in his belt, fingertips on the door frame, tossing apprehensive glimpses though the rear window. The loose lines around his jowls tightened under the blinking of streetlights. Two cars of unmistakable government flavor were tailing Ms. Woeburne, black Lincolns, awfully conspicuous about it, high-beams switching on-off in communication. They accelerated and decelerated in tandem, like an army convoy. Beckett was surprised Ingvar had noticed.

"Don't mind them," the Seneschal assured him, flashing that awkward, fake-it-til-you-make-it grin. "Just security. For the trip. Current events, you know. We like to be overcautious rather than undercautious. The Prin—" She visibly remembered the Gangrel's lie. "My fath—" This one was even harder. It got stuck, right there, in the hatch of her throat. "Mr. LaCroix takes safety very seriously," Woeburne finally settled, fingers strangling the wheel. She didn't comment further. She drove on in silence for a while.

Beckett settled against the charcoal upholstery, tilting his neck back. It had been a moderately uncomfortable flight towards an uncomfortable, violent place—nevertheless, he looked forward to putting his hands on the Ankaran Sarcophagus. There was still pleasure in that: the first, childish touch. Pressing your fingers on something that is so incomprehensibly old.

No doubt what they ultimately found would disappoint the reigning _mogul du jour_ , but such is a sad fact of life. Legends always sound better in books than they do in cold, unromantic reality. Hopefully Johansen's archives sped the process along somewhat. He'd been Beckett's only hope of salvaging some useful reports from Clan Giovanni, the bumbling idiots they are; and Ingvar, the mumbling, glorious intellectual he is, hadn't failed him. He'd gotten wicked awful bronchitis and choked up blood for half the expedition, but still, he got the job done. Nice work, Beckett had said. You've still got it in you, you old ham.

It would've been interesting to tag along personally. Alas, strange murmurings from Chicago's thin-blood community—well, that plus affection for old friends in the area—kept him in the Midwest longer than was fashionable for dig sites. And Beckett's friends always had the most curious things to say.

Now, viola! He was shuttling off to Los Angeles, as promised, good on him—into the explosive remains of a staggering Free-State, and at the beck of these fork-tongued Ventrue who hoped to turn precious artifacts into political bargaining chips. What would they win at the tail end of this well-funded endeavor? Bodily dust and a few bleached bones. It was funny, really. A familiar lesson in the grand course of his career, but one that often made Beckett smile.

The Gangrel pushed his hat brim over his eyes and cast a bored glance at their chauffeur. Blacktop passed smoothly under the luxury car. Miles away, those old-penny arches of the Vincent Thomas cut through skyline, a skewed clear-night cloud kebob. Dr. Johansen was slouching in back, gnarled hands folded powerlessly over his potbelly and a worried, mortal glisten coating the whites of both eyes. Ms. Woeburne drove forcefully; her jaw was set, razorlike, tense as a new bedspring. Her pupils scurried in the rearview mirror. Ventrue are aggressive creatures, no matter how insistent and optimistic their attempts at small talk. Ventrue are posturing, shell games, trials-by-fire calculated sacrifices. She caught him considering her and whipped out a too-cheerful, too-friendly smile. His response was flimsy. More wince than teeth, Beckett—but it was the best he could do under the circumstances, and she didn't seem to expect much more.

He wondered briefly whether or not S. Woeburne would survive this—and, if not, who would drive him back to Los Angeles International when the timer was up.

They pressed for another congested half-hour, arriving, finally, outside the bullyish brick brute, Empire Arms Hotel. Big, overjuiced letters—here it is. Beckett sniffed at them, at the inaccuracy of the faux-Romanesque columns. Then he wished goodnight to his associate and watched Woeburne run Dr. Johansen inside. They whisked through the marble lobby and disappeared into an elevator. Ingvar followed the Ventrue like a cataracted sheep, fumbling forward, hoping she would lead him somewhere good to sleep. It was much as he'd done since they left O'Hare, and frankly, enough to make a vampire of reasonable humanity itch. The old man instinctually felt that something was dreadfully, inexplicably wrong about Beckett—about all of these people, fresh-faced and steam-ironed. And yet his reliance upon logic would not allow him to theorize. Beckett was, after all, a colleague. Disconcerting, slinking, even creepy—an exceptional, irregular colleague, to be sure—but a colleague, something recognizable. Decent, even. Worthy of trust.

And that is the lucky thing about kine. Like cattle, the dumb ones are too thick to notice a meat-eater among them, and the smart ones too convinced by their science to believe.

Brisk, carbonated Ms. Woeburne probably didn't feel as wrong to the doctor's sensibilities; she was still new enough to project normalcy, even if it was normal vinegar, normal brusqueness, normal annoyances. Not as intriguing as Beckett, perhaps—obviously not as brilliant—but less frightening, somehow. _Don't worry; don't strain yourself; everything is already planned—_ this is the way Ventrue socialize, the way a clan of self-christened aristocrats has won the world for themselves. They are so sure that what they told you would happen will. They are the givers of strategy, the coordinators, the organizers of what little life you'd live. He had loathed that arrogance in his youth. But Beckett suspected most neonates, and most young people, do.

It was convenient enough to have them arranged so closely to one another, he supposed. The Seneschal's proximity ensured Johansen's protection, so long as she (and, Beckett supposed, he) remained in Prince LaCroix's good graces. And at least said Prince wouldn't get academic cold feet with his spy living just upstairs.

A chime disturbed his train of thought. Woeburne's cellular phone was sitting in a cup holder, vibrating, screen winking on. It rang thrice. Five minutes later, and still no sign of its owner clacking down the sidewalk.

Beckett tapped his foot, folded his sunglasses into a brown coat pocket, and decided that he might as well do a little snooping.

Checking to make sure the bodyguards had hoofed inside (they had), the Gangrel flipped her telephone awake. He thumbed through a contacts list, identified the few names he knew, and noted, quickly, that her messages had been recently cleaned. Slightly disappointing, but at least there was the one. It was from an unlisted number that didn't register on the Seneschal's caller I.D.

Beckett opened the Ventrue's wallet, which was sitting in her nearby purse; flipped through the cards; and, after a numerical few misses, plugged in the last four digits of her social. It worked. Embarrassing.

Voicemail:

" _That's great, Woeburne. Real nice. You bring a shitstorm to my door, and now you can't even pick up your fucking phone to talk to me? You know what—fine. I don't care._

" _Look, I don't know what the hell happened the other night. I don't know what happened to you, either—where are you? What I do need you to know is that I had nothing to do with you getting shot at. We gave you a hard time, I realize, but that was not me. I have never shot at you. It was not my people. You don't like me, London, but if you have an ounce of integrity, you'll vouch for us._

" _You wanted to know what you should say to me. That's it. Tell me you aren't going to cry wolf on us when you know I had no part in that mess. That is all I want from you at this point and if you've been worth it, you'll come through._

" _The Sabbat are going to kill you, Woeburne. Nobody else particular wants that to happen. Not me. But if LaCroix can pin us for a dead Seneschal, he will, and he won't stop that bullet because of you. You're smart and you know it._

_"Now, I can still work with you on this. But if you want my help, you need to put me in a better position. You need to come through._

_"Best I can do for you, senator. You aren't dead, think about it."_

The recording ended, and Beckett switched off her cellular phone.

That didn't sound like Accounting.

"Telling," he said, brows arching, remembering the way her eyes had seemed nervous, and the way she had favored her leg.

Now it makes sense. It will, given a bit of nosiness and a little time. Things are always this way with Ventrue, after all. Even—especially—the stiff ones who make themselves smile.

Teach him for typecasting. Wasn't that a perfect plot twist? The Prince's own majordomo, however ambivalently, casting her chips into cross-partisan games. Throwing lifelines, you might say, off her erstwhile battleship. In case of a sink? Or in case said Prince's priorities did not include her head fixed fast to her shoulders? Who knows? Probably not her.

So _that_ was why she had been so persnickety about the news of a coup against their local Free-State, eh? Double-dealing the local Brujah is not wise, perhaps, but it is much gutsier than he'd wanted to give Woeburne credit for, and far more divisive than ancilla shoe-shiners usually dare to be.

You could have called Beckett surprised. Not impressed—but surprised, nonetheless.

Now remained the prickly what-next: to tell Sebastian his latest sugarplum soldier was walking the wobbly Jyhad fence, or preserve her lie and watch this cat's cradle crumple into a knot? As if that was even a legitimate question. Beckett is an observer, not an informant, and he certainly does not squeal. Ventrue are perpetual schemers, anyway—cutthroat operatives and diehard loyalists until they aren't. Back one against a conspiracy wall, and the spiny cactus will drop all its needles and pop like an overripe grape. So they should really see each other coming, you'd think. They're bound to live-n-learn.

Besides, he's no loyalty to the Camarilla, and none to Los Angeles, either.

By the time Ms. Woeburne had locked Ingvar snugly to stable, Beckett was through poking about. He paid a little more attention to her face this time around, as she moved through those doors and came down the stairs—and yes, definitely, it was more scared than it had been out east—alert, acutely aware, expecting a shot. She returned to find him with loosely folded arms and a catlike smile.

"I'm sorry that took me so long." Blissfully unawares, this apology. She plopped into the driver's seat and clicked her safety belt, reaching for the stick. "There was some confusion about reservations or whatnot. The night staff is completely incompetent. Squared away, though," Woeburne bristled. "Shall we press on to the Tower? Prince LaCroix's dedicated an entire floor to your investigation. Cleared it. You'll probably need a lab..."

"Samples would be useless to me without one," the Gangrel agreed. For all their organization and conceit, Ventrue do like to make the simple assumptions very difficult.

"That's no problem. Just compile a list and forward it to me; I have blanket authority to approve all the equipment, tech, or manpower you might require. I understand he has also arranged one of his finest residential rooms for you. We thought it would be best if you had immediate access to the sarcophagus around-the-clock. And you'll be provided with all the necessary keys."

"Will I? How exciting." Sarcasm, but of a complacent variety. Beckett's amusement was more tired than malicious. He rapped the dash. "Let's proceed to the tower, then. No sense in prolonging the inevitable, and I suspect your Sire's getting antsy."

She chuckled through her nose. "You suspect correctly."

Before they drove, the Ventrue reached up to her visor, removing a manila envelope that had been pinned there. It wasn't nearly as hefty as the last document she'd given him.

"I'd like you to take this," Ms. Woeburne said, handing over the file. "It probably isn't news, considering you've got Dr. Johansen at your disposal, but the Giovanni sent us more images. I've also included a primer on city zones I think you might find useful: where to go, where not to go, where territories intersect. And an index card with my contact information is floating around in there somewhere—just in case you need my assistance." (By "floating around," she meant stuck to the front page in bold font. Beckett didn't fancy raining on the poor thing's welcome party parade, but he reckoned the chances of needing a puppet Seneschal's assistance were dismally small.)

He didn't bother rifling through the sleeve, but tucked it his satchel between a paperback and an empty clipboard. "You are a walking help desk, young one."

"Yes, I do my best." She twisted on the ignition.

Fifteen minutes of street—and they are all so unremarkable in America, cities—all rectangles and spires—all that looks the same—and Beckett found himself parked in a four-tier lot across from the LaCroix Foundation headquarters. It was a daunting fixture in the sprawl of LA: onyx brick, backlit and intimidating; furious, fastidious windows that glared; soaring heights topped with a lightning rod more like a spear. All in all, everything he expected. Plutocrat citadel; dictator's boast. He was underwhelmed. And perhaps the Seneshcal expected he would be. She'd not pestered him at all during the short ride, but he could tell she wanted to—the un-commitment of silence unnerved her. She fidgeted. She pressed out breaths. When the engines quieted, Woeburne sat for a moment, rehearsing some thoughts. Her eyes gazed blankly through the folded moon roof and the woman's lips were pursed.

She knew the giant that waited in the tippy-top of that great stalk. In this, she was not like him. Everything of her depended upon little hill-king monsters like Sebastian LaCroix.

"I suppose we should go in," Seneschal LA said finally, decisively, dropping her keys into a pocket and rummaging for the seatbelt release. "The Prince looks forward to meeting you. And I really am glad to see you again. I'm sorry if I seem… what is it. Disjointed. This is just a somewhat stressful time."

Beckett regarded her bluntly, his scrutiny not unkind.

"Oh," he said. "Don't worry. I'm used to it." Then: "You're not the first Camarilla do-girl I've met, Ms. Woeburne." And then: "I seriously doubt you'll be the last. But I think you might be gratified to know: you're the most surprising so far."

She looked befuddled, as though a perfect stranger had called her by name.

"Oh. Well. Thank you. I suppose," Ms. Woeburne cringed. She forked open her door. "If there's nothing else you need to do tonight, I'll walk you up to see the Prince now."

Beckett shouldered his bag and sighed.

"I'll try not to get you downsized," was all that he could promise.


	75. Out on the Water

Nines Rodriguez frowned at his hands. Finding nothing, he glanced up, ghost-eyed, and looked to the black rumble of Pacific.

The waves were dark on Santa Monica. It scared him. Oil-dark—dead field, Midwest thunder, funnel cloud, never-coming-back dark—dragging sand down the banks and sweeping it away, underwater, gone. Quiet night. Breezy. The flatland kind of wind; the kind that carries smells from far away, spooking the horses, giving them a whiff of brine and woods and wild, evil places where nobody goes; the kind that puts this sort of fear in him.

There's no words for these nights that make sense. You've got to get yourself caught in one. Something blows in from that big empty black—it'll get around you, inside you, making you feel bright, low-to-the-earth, ungodly, small. You just have to know it when it's on you. And you will.

The Baron stepped to the precipice of this beach tunnel and stood with his feet on the concrete, staring out at the shore. Nobody there—just him at the edge of these woods. _Just you, babychild._ Close to land, tiny whitecaps rushed around the pier's wood legs; they hurried, dissolved, were hushed back into the mass. Sewers, charcoal, fish and salt; yacht bows, nosing the harbor, gleaming in the moonlight; reflection off the Ferris Wheel, colors turned off. One dark thing, goes on forever. Along the crumbling cliffs, through chainlink fence, pulling the buoys down, letting them flail, pulling them down again. He can't describe it. It's disaster, premonition, in the water and the air, lying out there, heart beating under the moon, somewhere past the point where you can't tell where one black and the other begins.

Nines shrugged his coat higher even though he could feel August moving in on him, as far west as west can go. He breathed in. Saline; worn red bricks; seaweed; old popcorn; baitfish; disaster. It is one of those nights.

Baron LA stood there for a moment longer, uneasy for those reasons he can never explain, and then emerged, stepping onto the cold, packed, dismal sand, outdoor lights turning his back a sickly white, where the moon could see his face. Whoever had poked around this beach cleared out hours ago, leaving their firepit to a slow, smoky death. Gasoline spills, burnt hotdog skin, and driftwood that winked a weak, ominous orange whenever the ocean wind breathed on them. There were shoeprints in the surf. Gulls molting under the boardwalk; barnacles on its knees, like teeth; overpass running past the end of the earth you could walk on.

Rodriguez looked far—to the run-down house on the bluff, one beat of lamplight over a swaybacked porch. He tightened his mouth. Look a little past that, anchored in the bay, and there it is: a skeleton-ship, a flash on the water of what must've been the _Elizabeth Dane_. He shivered. It was getting to be that time of year.

"Great fucking place for an ambush," the man said aloud. He was answered by the sudden dull bang of boots on the concrete behind him, and then a voice.

"Ain't it just," it mused, and Nines Rodriguez spun on his heel to face Smiling Jack.

The old Anarch sauntered up with hands in his jean pockets, a machete handle jutting from the inside of his vest, and that debauched yellow grin through the outrageous beard. Cigar, dynamite, chaos; this is the stuff that follows that no-pack wolf around. Show up under a moon like that in the middle of the night; roll into a city on the tip-toe of a siege; park beside a Camarilla house. Nothing bothered Smiling Jack. He had no orbit. Show up in Los Angeles, too—last year, finally here—out of nowhere—rock star, explosions, blow the man down. He was impervious to the snakes. Impervious to Barons, too—something Jack would not let this one forget.

Nines figures himself a throw smarter than the average Brujah because he never forgets how fragile his existence is. He wears the bulletproof; he brings backup; he removes himself from the path of the cannon. But Nines Rodriguez is not Smiling Jack. Never was. Never will be. Nines is a different animal made of more corruptible stuff.

Jack is something un-animal, inhuman, on another wavelength, just walking around fuck-all like that, like he'd stroll right across the pieces of the game.

Or stomp down his foot, if he felt like it, and bring them all down.

Nines Rodriguez was looking more and more like a piece of the game to Jack—and Nines sensed this like a deer hunter senses a lion crawling through the grass. He can do nothing to stop it. He can only hope to placate this creature, distract it, or outmaneuver the eventual pounce.

Jack grinned at the younger Brujah. Tickled his funnybone how the Baron jumped in his skin—skittish boy, wide-eyed, reflex flinch for a weapon, hand at his hip. "Keep it in your pants, Rodriguez. I ain't gonna shoot you," and here comes that tommygun laugh.

Nines tried to save face. He crossed his arms, a stern look, chin angled defensively towards his chest. But the Baron didn't laugh back—and no matter how fierce the glare, how firm the stance, you can't miss a beast that hides its throat.

"I'm glad you decided to show up, this being your invitation. I hope you've got something I don't know," he said, tough talk, got-no-time. "Because I don't like this standing. There's shit needs doing. I could be a hundred other places besides parked out here to pitch a bonfire."

"I don't want to crush this boss vibe you've got going on, sonny, but I've got to let you in on two big points here. Your 'places' are don't concern me, and I can't imagine you really think I give a rat's ass about your precious time." Jack pulled a loose cigarette out of his pants, finding a lighter in the vest, striking it behind a cupped hand. Smoke snaked overhead towards that black no-star sky—and this was nerves talking, probably, had to be—but the whorls were unnaturally slow to blow away, break apart. "But yeah," he chuffed. "Since you brought it up, I've got some intel for you. Ran through this sack-of-shit burb in a couple hours, and let me shed some light: Forget Compton. Santa Monica crawls with these fucks. The local turncoat bitch and her nutjob sister are too busy throwing punches at one another to handle it. Shovelheads fucking like rabbits out by the old warehouse. _Tch_. Voermans—what can I say?" Another curly-q ringworm of smoke; the Anarch smiled eerily around his bite. Menacing, dingy canines, stark against the rolling paper. "Nice rack on crazy legs, though. Wouldn't mind breaking off a piece of that before Therese blows her brains out at the disco."

"What the fuck did you call me out here for?" Rodriguez tensed. A rat skittered down the underpass behind him, squeezing through a sewer, leaving him behind.

"Settle down, kid. I'll spell this out for you so there's no misunderstanding. You'll never control the Hallowbrook pack on your home court if you can't weed 'em out of these boonies. Landing in Compton few months back was a solid move for a couple reasons—more than the Sabbat ones. Great, congrats. But Santa Monica needs to fall into line before the dogs'll come to heel downtown. Capish? They've been making a sport outta picking off Caitiff—leaving a great big fucking mess—and frankly, it's gettin to pissing me off." The old Brujah kicked up sand with his steel toe. He took another drag and blew a smile full of smoke at Rodriguez. "Like you said. It's a great fucking spot."

Nines deflated his lungs and didn't scent the air again. "And so. What do you want me to do about it? Stakeout? Jump out of the water, say boo?"

Jack winked. "Now you're using your head. Pack of thin-bloods hunt this particular stretch of beach, so I hear—gather 'round, sing Kumbaya, bite drunk tourists and cry about being vampires. Sabbat catch a whiff of fresh meat like that? Seems like an opportunity to me. But you're the boss around this piss-hole, boyo. Far as your groupies are concerned, I'm part of the god damn scenery."

Nines thought about it. He contemplated, tongue running his top teeth, looking back over the Pacific about as far as he could see. "Then we'll bait them. It's reasonable. What we ought to do is block off the other access tunnel, padlock the gates, figure out their rotation and drop a line to Hallowbrook. Pier's closed for a month yet, so it'll do for a hiding spot. Top-down vantage. Sit a couple AKs up there, maybe a sniper, wait for the mutts to come running for food. Box them all in. Take a chunk out of the bastards, at least. And it makes a statement: I do not tolerate the Black Hand in Los Angeles."

" _You_?" Smiling Jack grinned. Nines held his ground, but the misspeak was telling, and the spokesman inwardly flinched.

It has always got to be _we_.

Jack took a couple steps closer, jerking his thumb towards the picket-fence bungalow sitting above them, nestled on the cliffside, busy dilapidating. Moss collapsed down the rock and the siding, where the Santorini-blue paint had been wiped off by rain. There were missing shingles, a sunk-in patch of roof, and a broken window gaped on the façade."See that dive up there, right on the overhang? Meth lab. Crackheads and some doped-up whores. I'm gonna tell you what. Seeing as that I'm feeling generous tonight and I got nothing else to do, I'll go knock on the door. Sad little shack of shit that it is, it'll work better for that sniper you're talking about. See Sabbat coming a long way off—nobody catches our spray-and-pray kids with their pants around their ankles. Maybe pick up some weapons, too, huh? Put some unhappy shovelheads up like a coupla of Roman candles." He shook the cigarette, flicked the ash, wedged it back between his cuspids. Nines was still thinking. He seemed to have to think about this shit a lot. "I'd stick that Bernardino asshole up there, personally. Considering we don't have a sharpshooter anymore."

Kent-Alan—poor kid—smug as shit—never saw it coming. Nines did a lot of thinking, but he shoved that thought away. "He'll do. Damsel's got a few hopefuls in the wings we can get in there, get their boots wet. You remember that Malk? Little shit. Goes by Chino?" He did not expect Jack would. "Washed up the other week. Hungry and been in a fight. Talked my goddamn ear off. Walking Masquerade violation, but the fledge was carrying more firepower than a fucking tank so I didn't ask questions. Paranoid schizophrenic. Not usually real violent, unless you get him going. I put the idea in his head that the Cam and the Thought Police are one in the same. I'm not exaggerating. Like a tank," Nines added. "I'll give him a story and give him some ghouls, keep things reined in. They can take the pier."

"Sounds like a barrel of fuckin monkeys." Jack gathered up a ball of spit and hawked it into the crater he'd dug with his boot. This action irritated Rodriguez beyond all logic and he had to swallow the urge to tell a living legend _you know what, go fuck yourself_.

"Also. I want you to call Christie," the Baron snapped, the instinct to back up and growl coming unpinned. He flattened his upper lip before it snarled. "Deacon, too, if she's willing to bring him. We've got bodies. But we need soldiers. I'm thinking long-term, and we can't make do with the children we got."

"Uh. Nuh-uh, sonny." Jack shot this request down with a nonchalant cluck of his tongue. "No can do."

He could tell Nines wasn't about to give up, though—not without a try, because that's what a Brujah does when he can't do anything else: talk. "She'd be a hell of an asset," the Baron pushed. Jack could've been offended by that shitty attempt at persuasion, but decided he wasn't worth getting worked up about.

"Yeah. I'm sure. Except she's doing a job for me in San Fran that's more important than your little shootout."

"You think I won't talk to her direct? I told you out of respect."

The threat struck air like a cardboard match. Nines's look was severe, lineless, completely sober—and Smiling Jack laughed in his face—right in the sinking Free-State's blue eyes.

"You start talking to my kid, bucko, and I'll call up Therese Voerman—have us a little chat about border patrol. She might think it's a mighty coinky-dink her real estate empire starts going up in flames right about the same time somebody I know just put in a big old astrolite order with Gabe Milam."

Nines's look tightened. Confusion, or dread, or both thrown into a bag full of phosphorus and nails. He blinked. He had to get that tight spot down before any more talking could be done. "What the hell are you talking about?"

"Oh, come the fuck on," Jack jabbed when the Baron's face went innocently, good liar blank. "Like I didn't hear about that? Giovanni appraiser gets whacked in Santa Monica carrying a briefcase full of mafia buckeroonies, a financier drops off the grid before he can cash in a Voerman check, and then another gallery heist last week? Who coulda done that? Who out there in this little old town might be interested in fleecing some quick Camarilla cash? Who do I know buying up artillery just as fast as he can get his lil' commie paws on it?"

"You dealing in rumors now? That what this is? Where the fuck did you hear this bullshit?"

Smiling Jack gave a three-beat chuckle, real movie villain guffaw. When his hunch fucked with you, the old badger knew. "You think I hit the beachfront listening-in on conversations about you? Give me a break, boyo. I didn't 'hear' shit. But I just turned this town on its ass. I saw Hollywood plates out here. And I know it wasn't Sabbat."

It was not him. Nines Rodriguez says those words with extreme conviction all the time, whenever they stand between him and something worse. But this is fright as much as honesty. This time, it really wasn't.

And it's just possibility. Possibility shouldn't do this to you like it did it to Nines.

But it's possible: Nicky didn't lift his mad money from Isaac.

And it's possible: Nicky knew exactly what Nines Rodriguez was going to do with that money—ordinance, insurance, bombs—and he had a good idea where a hard-pressed Baron with his back to a Hollywood wall and his feelers out in Santa Monica might be looking to expand.

Possible: Nicky needed somebody to set up.

"I don't know," Nines managed, and his throat was stiff and wound enough to warble if he didn't keep swallowing. It almost, and this is ugly truth, cracked. "What the fuck you think you're onto here, saying this out-of-nowhere shit to me, but I will tell you now. You are barking up the wrong god damn tree. You don't know," he swore-to-god, cross-his-heart, hope-to-die, "what the fuck you're talking about. And neither do I."

Jack squinted. Jack lost his smile.

He grinned.

"Check this. Why don't you cut the crap, sonny-boy. 'Out of respect' my dead gray ass." It sounded violent, suddenly, and Nines thought about leaving, getting himself gone—but Jack just sighed, giggling, wiping his forehead with a hairy arm. "You want soldiers? Bat your eyes at a girl with a gun? Stick to the college kids, you slick shit. I'm not wasting my people on you."

Temper—this is what all Brujah have. Nines felt it simmering up under the nauseating pulse of panic, turning sour, ozone in the blood. Back teeth clench; arms sore; shoulders stiff, fingers twitching in want of a fist. But he swallowed it down. If you are going to live you have got to know how to close your mouth and choke it back.

"I don't think you're hearing me," was all he got to say.

"What're you gonna do? _Pull rank_? Kick me out of your little _club_?" Jack barely finished it. There was no attempt to hold his humor down. "Bah-hah-hah! Oh, man— _classic_."

Rodriguez held it. He was breathing stiffly, oxygen rising and falling beneath the Anarch's collarbone. He was angry; he was biting on his tongue. "No one will believe you. No one who has been in LA, knows this operation, knows me, is going to buy into that load of bullshit from somebody like you."

"Oh ree-a-lly? Man like you," Jack mused, tossing his cigarette, gesturing with the stub of it, throwing it into the surf. "He's got a reputation to uphold. Man like you is an opportunist. Christie is jack-shit nobody, and nobody cares, but don't think she doesn't know it. And don't think everybody else won't."

Rodriguez looked hard at the big old Brujah who had blown into his city, his side of LA. He did not move. That Pacific wind came in, and it cut through Nines's coat, raised fine hairs on the back of his neck.

"Are we goin to have a problem?" he asked, voice low, saying it carefully, focused on making every word. "Because this shit from you is the LAST thing I need."

Jack looked back at him.

Jack was still, was always, smiling.

"C'mere. Lemme tell you something, boyo," the Anarch said, beckoning Nines with a turn of one heavy paw. His contemporary stepped forward fast, impatient, resentful, get-it-over-with, police dog who had started hating police. It was too close. It was too close for anybody to walk into strike range of Smiling Jack.

"I don't like your style, Rodriguez," Jack informed him. He spoke calmly—laidback, leisurely distaste, kill you and care less, a danger that thickened the space between them and scared Nines to the bone.

"And," the Baron said. That's all.

" _And_ ," Jack cut. "I don't like you. I don't like seeing punk-ass Brujah strut around like God's gift to the Free-State, licking Toreador boots for a couple scraps of authority. I'm helping you out on this one because I like the Sabbat even less." That catcher's mitt of a hand fell on Rodriguez's shoulder, clapping down; he could not help it; he felt himself gasp inside his skin. "But you and me?"

Tobacco burning. Moonlight uprooted that old middle-of-nowhere fear.

Nines Rodriguez did not cringe. He did not curl his tail and back away. But he wanted to. Jesus Christ, sometimes these nights get in him, and all he can do is not think about what it would take to drop this spear and run.

"I ain't one of your mooks, Nines. We ain't blood brothers. And I," Jack swore, "don't take orders from you."

The little Baron stared at him and over this water and under this sky looked like he had gone to stone.

"Comprende?" Jack asked, thumped him in the back, and laughed his way down Santa Monica's darkening beach.


	76. Contract Termination

On August sixth—roundabout two AM—the bell rang, and Ms. Woeburne answered it.

Eugene Walker was standing outside in the foyer, hands in his pockets, looking surprised she had come to the door.

Calling her startled wouldn't exactly be correct. But there was a stalled moment in which neither creature knew how to react. E blinked. Ms. Woeburne did not ask how he came to her.

"You're here," he said, as though he could not help it. His complexion was unusually sickly, from rust of his roots to the veins in his throat. "The front desk said you were, but I wasn't—I wasn't sure. I've checked so many—all the time. They wouldn't tell me when you'd be in. Or if you were back. I didn't—"

His try withered at the coldness sweeping across that Ventrue face; impatience was in the jut of her chin, in her straight back, and in how that reticle stare seemed too hyperfocused to be dead. Wet brunette was pulled into tight and uncompromising tail behind her head. It looked like she had just stepped out of the shower. One time E had met Ms. Woeburne—that's it. He hadn't stored memories about the unkind lines in a face that was truthfully not very hard, or the way she wore her hair. But he could recall the way her eyes would run inside themselves, computing, predicting, nervous, silently hostile, a little shifty. Her body was strangely still. Her unbuttoned suit jacket was black and camisole under a little bit damp and the buttons lay perfectly flat. The blank corners of her eyes matched the colonnades outside, whites chipped from rhinoceros tusks. She was a difficult woman to feel at ease around.

Ms. Woeburne did not say anything. She stood there, unsmiling, one hand on the metal doorknob. Her posture was stately and unreadable. She waited for him to speak.

"Sorry if I'm bothering you," E choked, caught in that harsh look, recognizing himself as an inconvenience. Anxious hands found their way deeper into his cargo pockets; fingers clenched around the thumbs; he struggled to look her in the face. His eyes, though, could not do it. They were brackish green, darker and hazier than hers, and flickered from doorframe to the spotless elevator he'd just left behind. She had no reason to remember him. She had no reason to say anything at all. "You're busy, I know. I've been trying to get a hold of you for months. For a year. I tried to put in a message at Venture Tower they said you left LA. No one would give me your number. I didn't know if—"

She wasn't speaking. The crosshairs in those eyes were fierce and unreadable. A little bead of water curled around the back of her ear and kept going, rolling, until it disappeared under the spotless lapel.

"Can I come inside?" E asked, more than a little desperately. He had a bad taste in his mouth. She stood there in the doorway and would not open it enough for him to see inside.

Ms. Woeburne looked him over head-to-toe, blinked unhappily, and, finally, opened her mouth. "I'd prefer it if you didn't. Follow me."

She stepped outside, shutting the door quietly behind her—the latch was loud in this viscous silence—and led him away.

The Ventrue's back moved swiftly ahead of him down this unpopulated corridor—dark fabric, tiny c-curl of ponytail at the base of an upright neck, straight and confident hips. It was hard keeping up with her. She did not speak to him. It was quiet and lonely here; Empire Hotel, muscular brick, kept its lounges downstairs. E had smelled the nightcaps and cigars as soon as he'd stepped inside. This building was wealth dressed in a suit of polished red clay, lace curtains, warm yellow marble. The doormen were menacing and the bellhops contemptuously polite. It made his sweat glands wake suddenly beneath the collar of the polo he wore, the best clothing E had managed, a watery teal. He could hear an alto singing in a ballroom below them; he could hear the clack of pool balls, glasses clinking. Everything felt muted through the bear-brown carpet that ate his footprints up. It was difficult imagining Lily wandering through this moneyed, standoffish place—the sort of place where senators drink with bygone actors, estate inheritors, and the oldest of the Old Republicans. It glistened like mobsters, governors' mistresses, and good whiskey.

The hallway they moved down was powerfully air conditioned. They passed no one. Dim light scones and walnut paneling negated cream wallpaper. Then Ms. Woeburne stopped suddenly and pushed into a public bathroom— _ladies_ , he saw with a flush of discomfort. Her heels sounded like gunshots the moment they stepped off the taupish rug. Even the damn can was pretentious. It was all mosaic and makeup lights. The moment he entered, she strode swiftly back around him and secured the heavy wooden door. She peeked in every immaculate stall. She leant a tall lamp across the entrance as a blockade, not caring if it confused someone, or if its white lip broke.

"I am about to leave for a meeting," the vampire told him, a voice as stiff and precise as her walk. There was a real second of fear when she turned to face him, of his fine hairs standing high. The last time they'd been in the same space together, it was his turf; it was E's modest apartment, and she'd been bowed over a sink with swollen eyes, a broken nose, and cracked fingers; she'd been wearing Lily's ratty pajamas, excess fabric pooling at her ankles, sitting on their slumping couch; she'd been disturbed and fidgety. He'd felt wary of the Ventrue then. What about now? In her element, Ms. Woeburne was neither harmless nor scattered. Both underlids were sallow and bruised, the pistachio skin of her irises ringed around empty points; it looked like she had just dressed for work, a flick of dark hair stuck to the contour of one cheek, alarming, whorling up at the bottom. There was nothing familiar or friendly about her. So hard to imagine Lil here, around this woman, in her employ, in her home. "So I'll ask you to be brief. Why are you here?"

"Something's going on with Lily." He blurted it—because Ms. Woeburne was an impatient person, because it was nerve-wracking being sealed in porcelain with someone his Sire had wronged, and because it was not something he could say slowly, with the months of not-knowing foaming up beneath his brain. "After I called you, that night—she never came home. I can't find her. All the places I thought she might be, she wasn't, and I hoped maybe you had an idea."

He might've kept jabbering, something both E and Lily tended to do when knocked below a spotlight, but Ms. Woeburne spoke. " _The Last Round_ ," she shot simply, eyes rolling, not bothering with details. "It's a dive downtown; Kindred-owned, fronts as a pub. I can give you the address. Then you are on your own."

Woeburne ripped some notepaper from a napkin receptacle. The tearing noise was brutal; he intervened. "I've been there, but they won't give me the time of day. So I came here. Listen—I'm not accusing you, but I'm counting on you helping me. When we talked on the phone…" The story took on a fraught, lost edge. Ms. Woeburne's face cooled remarkably from annoyance to displeasure; she crunched the unused tissue in one hand. "I know she was here right before she disappeared."

"Do you?" It was a challenge—an unkind question, but a real one. Ms. Woeburne threw her scrap of paper away. The motion looked ruthless; the mirrors captured straight, strong shoulder blades beneath inexpressive fabric and bleak bulbs. His body language was weak and sloppy in comparison, cheekbones set wide and easy-to-read. The garbage flap squeaked in this empty, lemoned, fresh tile room. "Let me be clear with you," she went on. "Your Sire caused a great deal of trouble for me. As a consequence, I am not very interested in prolonging our relationship. I will tell you that she left my employ alive. She left, do you understand, and that is the last I heard of her. I really do not care to hear any more."

"But can't you—? But you have to at least—?"

Her impatience escalated. She wouldn't be bothered; his stomach was sinking, hopelessness surging towards the thin-blood's heart. It must have been part of how Lily saw this world. E had always feared Kindred more than she had; he was not embarrassed by his paranoia, which always seemed like a rational emotion. But if this stout, rich place, and this stout, rich person had been so much of her life, had absorbed her experience, maybe he could have tried harder to understand. Maybe he could have convinced her, had an argument. Maybe he could have sympathized and said something better than he had.

"I've told you what I can," Ms. Woeburne repeated thinly. "And I would advise you to stay away from Lily Harris. She has lost our protection, and I will not vouch for her again."

That said, the Ventrue unblocked the door, righting the lamp. E coughed on the catch in his throat. He had to stop her.

"Look, please." Every touch of her small soles against the marble banged through him. There was an echo in here. E wore a dismayed stare and a slack mouth beneath a tousle of messy orange; his colors seemed tan in comparison to hers. He got as near to that back as he dared. "The Anarchs won't tell me anything. I have no idea what happened with them—I don't know how they got their hooks into her—but I can't just leave it lie. I know you have bigger things to worry about. I know what it must look like to you; you never did wrong by us. But I've about run out of options and I think Lily's out of time."

It was startling when she about-faced, curt and compact. He retreated several steps.

"You have no idea what is going on here," the Ventrue warned him, lips tapering precariously, well-kept canines very tidy and very sharp. She was aggressive, imperfect Englishness, tongue perking up as though the accent was not entirely under her control. It twitched over consonants, through the shortened, economical vowels. He felt overly large and inaccurate shut in these barren, unsoiled walls with her—a badly put-together bit of woodshop next to war machinery. "So I will try to be as direct as possible. This isn't an issue of secrecy. It is about where your Sire decided to place her loyalties. And it may be that those decisions have already played out. In which case, there is nothing you can do; I am no friend to her Party, their advocates are hostile to me, and as you've already discovered, they aren't likely to talk. She knew this and did it anyway. My commitments, as I see it, are ended," said the crisp, authoritarian voice. "I can't do anything more."

It was not voluntary. It just happened to him, latching on his anger, throwing it over, like a big spoon catches a lid and sometimes flips the pot.

"You work for one of the richest men in the city," E shouted, the word 'city' fisting inside his throat. He knew so little. He had only what Lily had told him, and no—God help him—he had not listened to it all. "Look, I may not know exactly what's going on here. I don't. I know I don't. But I know that if you wanted to find someone—"

"Lower your voice," she instructed. The quickness of that command gutted him. Eugene Walker stood feebly; his ear tips reddened as much as they still could.

He could not yell at her. He could not rationalize with her. He could beg, and that was all. "You don't have to help us. I know that," E lamented, fishing for mercy that was not there. She looked at him vacantly in front of that heavy swinging door—the gold on mahogany, the polish on the wood. Her palm was flat upon the face. "But all the same, we need help. She said you could be trusted once, so I'm coming to you. I'm afraid something terrible happened to her. She could be held against her will, for all I know. She could be out of California entirely. She could be—"

Words flopped in his mouth. He was unable form the image or the sentence. He could not say it out loud.

Ms. Woeburne, a creature of tact and timetables, took pause. She thought about it for a moment.

"I don't care," the Ventrue announced, neatly and fluently as her pressed lapels, and that was the end of their business here. "I have told you what I know, and I have had my say. More than that, I can't give you. Goodnight."

She left E in the hotel washroom with nothing but a lot of too-late empathy and a cold dead end.


	77. Throwing Lifelines

INCOMING – RECEIVED

424-531-6577  
DATE 8.21.2011 21:06  
CALL DURATION 0:08:51

 

**[BEGIN RECORDED TRANSCRIPT]**

 

Woeburne.

 

_Now you pick up._

 

Now I do. What’s the issue.

 

_“What’s the issue?” Are you fucking serious?_

 

I am fucking otherwise engaged. You’ll have to be quick. Hard for you, I realize. But. You did want something?

 

_Sorry. I’m in a real bad mood—and you’re about to be.  Listen to this shit. You know who I just got off the phone with?_

 

Oh, let me see. Grünfeld Bach?

 

_Not tonight, senator. You and me got too much to do. I just talked to Bertram Tung._

Ah. All right. And _why_ are you contacting payrolled Camarilla—

 

_Can you let me say what I’m saying? Not what you expected to hear; granted. Not my idea of a fun weekend, either. But I had some out-of-towner questions and your guy cleared things up. You know about that Giovanni rep, disappeared in Santa Monica a few months back?_

Obviously. Try to remember who you’re talking to.

 

_Right—here’s the real fucking twist. I got a burning hunch I know who set that up, and why. And it had shit to do with the Sabbat organizing. They didn’t organize anything. They were tipped off._

Are you suggesting my intel is wrong?

 

_I’m suggesting—on the off-chance—you hear me out, here, and then you hustle. Sober up, London. I am about to confide something in you._

From a strictly professional bipartisan standpoint, I’m going to have to strongly disadvise you from doing so. From an Intelligence standpoint? Please. Go on.

 

_Do you have any idea how creepy you are? Look—Bertram Tung. He let me in on a security reel over at Bergamot, which is of course a Voerman acquisition. Or it was until that rep got smoked. Take your best guess as to who’s been fucking around there, right about the time Giovanni’s appraiser bit the dust, trying to snatch that place up for himself?_

If I had to guess—and I hate doing this: The Hollywood Toreador.

 

_The motherfucking Hollywood Toreador.  I got one particular suspect in mind._

Back up. If you’re implying what I seriously think you are, the time for cloying with me was over five minutes ago. If this is a murder investigation. If this is a hit-and-grab charge. This is not an option. You have to tell me everything you know. That’s HAVE-to. In full, in sequence, in detail, right now.

 

_That’s why I called. That, and I bet we—you and me—could make this son-of-a-bitch sing._

Hold on. I never said—just. Wait a half-minute, would you. Who are we talking about? You didn’t give me a name.

 

_Do you know Nicky Shih?_

Nicky Shih—Ash Rivers’s CPA?

 

_Ding-ding. Look who’s doing her job. Fifty-thousand-dollar question: Who do you think just signed off a deed to Bergamot Station?_

_Hello. Woeburne?_

 

All right. I see your concern.

_Oh, it gets better. Just so happens Nicky made a significant no-strings investment in my operation last year. You see where I’m going with this?_

That would be “laundering.”

 

_Not the dirt variety, either. He dumped blood money on me and vamoosed._

 

Cht. You’re fucked. Good run, though. Cheers.

 

_Honey, you ain’t even heard the best part. Guess whose goon I’d just met with that night you got barbequed?_

Oh. OH.

 

_Million-dollar winner._

 

Son-of-a-bitch. Oh, no. No, no. He is going down for this. I will not stand for it. I’ll run right through him. I won’t.

 

_That make you mad, senator? Because I don’t know about you, but I am more than a little bit steamed some penny-pinching Hollywood dipshit like Nicky Shih thinks he can wine me and dine me and dick me over on a fake murder charge._

Dick YOU over? Oh, sure. You. I got fucking— No. Hell no. Put a fork in him. He is done.

_You want to do something about it?_

All right. All right. Send me—well, just send me everything you have. I don’t expect it’s a lot in writing, but send it. I’ll need to talk to Claudia Fairholm about this. I’ll do some eavesdropping; I’ll make some calls. Once I’ve scrounged up half a report, I’ll put it to the Board. It’s a certifiable shot at Abrams, so I imagine they’ll take it. I don’t imagine they’ll wait.

 

_Given our recent history—especially the fact that I don’t think you’re supposed to be talking to me about jack shit anymore, let alone Sabbat movement—probably not your best idea._

 

Clearly. But what the fuck else can I do? Reasonably. I’m not even going to ask you about your “investment,” whatever that means. But this needs more testimony than a shady phone call from an anonymous informant. You know that won’t go over with the court. You know I can’t let him.

 

_I know. And you won’t. Let’s meet face-to-face and talk this shit through. I’ll be in Echo Park in an hour and I won’t bring anybody. But we got to deal._

 

When? Now? I can’t just drop everything I—

You better be ABSOLUTELY sure. You had better be able to prove it.

****

_I can’t prove it. But I think we can get him to talk._

Well, peachy. Terrific. Can’t wait.

 

_See you soon, senator. Don’t get killed._

 

Fine. I’ll be there. I’ll be—

I’m fine.


	78. Danse Macabre

It was misting when Ms. Woeburne straightened her lapels and walked with javelin purpose into Nicky Shih’s half-empty house in Hollywood. A cold, fine rain. And she was, too.

The Seneschal took one brief, dispassionate look around—just to confirm. She knew what to expect, or told herself she did. Which isn’t exactly the same thing, but almost. It was silent as a desolate office in this unlived-in home. Yawning space wanted for furniture or footprints, but there were little to speak of. No one at the spotless dining room table. No one here to water the well-tended potted palms or prune the single rubber tree plant in the big ceramic fishbowl.  No one to wipe down the shining orange-papered walls. She shook off her slick black umbrella right on the hardwood floor just as Nicky came cantering two-at-a-time downstairs.

“Ah, good! Right on time. Early,” the Toreador lied, bunching up one sleeve to look at his watch. She made eye contact as rainwater dripped onto his entryway. The Ventrue was six minutes past nine.

“No,” she corrected. “Actually. I’m late.”

“Either way. I’m just glad you came, at all. In this weather and everything. Obviously, I want to clear this thing up just as fast as I can,” Nicky swore, and his red leather shoeheels touched the cream carpet. There was enough light in his plainclothes parlor to see the finest beginnings of a stress groove between unshaped eyebrows, and the wine-splotch birthmark on that lean face had not been changed by death. The man would’ve made a good model, if he’d ever been fed for it. He’d just enough self-comfortable strangeness to be unique in the lank-limbed way of business-chic. He looked smoothed-back and humble and charming. There is little Ms. Woeburne hates more than a charming man.

She said nothing. She felt the flesh behind her eyes go insensate as they did when someone was likely to lose right in front of her. She—not speaking, without looking away—gave the wet umbrella one last, definitive shake, and let the folded tarp smack the ground there beside Nicky Shih’s front door.

He played charm, but this schemer was nervous. There had been no fabric on his arm to push up; the cornflower blue cuffs were already pinned above pointy, aggressive elbows, and the metal clockface was bare.

She had given him good reason to be. Nervous, that is. Ms. Woeburne has a natural way of making your nerves all roll up and your teeth shiver tight together. She is one of those compact people whose energy feels like a spotlight in a dark room—it’s a little too focused and it’s not the summery kind of bright. She brings winter in with her when she steps inside such a clean, quiet room like this.

Imagine if you thought a person like Ms. Woeburne knew you might win a bonus for her death. Imagine if she suspected you’d tried.

“I don’t mean to be a pain,” Nicky grieved, gesturing helplessly, fighting the fear out from under his face to make a nonchalant wince. But it was no use; the muscles there had taken one brush of the Ventrue’s presence and gone stock-stiff. In those few introductory seconds and that dinosaur green she’d pinpoint on you, some of his cool edges had come unglued. “But just because of the circumstances…I’d be a clown if I didn’t at least ask for a weapons check.”

Ms. Woeburne complied. A hop of her eyebrows; a shrug of the shoulders. The blazer slipped to leave her buttoned-up in starchy white shirtsleeves. She tossed it over a wooden chairback, five deliberate paces ahead on modest bootheels. She’d no trouser pockets to turn out.

“Satisfactory,” she asked, but it was not really a question.

“It’ll do. Thanks a ton. I won’t pat you down.” Nicky smiled her up. There was no smile back. No one sat. Woeburne stood immovably behind that caped chair, and settled her hands one-two on its rim. He was stuck tugging an ear at the bottom of the flight. “But I really appreciate it. Not that I thought you’d pull one on a guy in his own place, Seneschal. Does a lot to make me feel better about things, though, and I don’t want to distract you with these little hoops any longer than I have to. I want you to ask me all the questions you need to set your story straight. Straight as an arrow. I’ll stay here all night, if that’s what it takes.”

“It won’t,” Ms. Woeburne promised. There was nothing in that hedge-clipped traveler’s voice to read into; not too little; not too much.

“Well,” Nicky figured—and you may or may not need a good officer to tell you the guiltiest foxes are as nice as nice can be. “If you need to step out or scoot off to some other affair, don’t let me stop you. Don’t let me be in your way.”

She did not need to tell him. He couldn’t, at this point, if he tried.

 _Hey_ , the dead man said—or, at least, this man who thought he knew the ins-and-outs of death well enough to dance madly over bear traps he’d laid in the grass. But he’s only one body in this number, isn’t he. Death is a danseuse that can change its clothes. Sometimes, yes, it’s loose rumors and men in the shadows, following you. Sometimes it really is all high-impact metal and dynamite and dogs in the road. Sometimes, it’s the night breeze that trickles in through an unshut door.

“Looks like you didn’t quite get it latched,” Nicky saw. He swirled his finger towards the inch of black air behind her, where it slipped out from the city and into the room. “Close the door, will you?”

Ms. Woeburne moved like a certain thing. An act of nature, or time. Or weather. She was provable fact.

She crossed the foyer and pushed it shut.

Sometimes it’s an engine fire. Other times, death is a woman in a suit.

 

**II.**

She doesn’t really remember how it went that night. There are occasional times in this business—the monstrous business of government—you just won’t. That does, of course, sound like something she’d say.

What Ms. Woeburne recalls, at least:

There was an ache in the soles of her feet. Seneschal LA had outright refused to sit. She would not be served drinks. She would not make nice. Instead, she chose a vantage point around the clean oak table—one that afforded her a direct view of her host’s front door, so that it would be easy to spot shadows moving behind the green-stained porthole glass.

She did not see any just then, though. She saw mostly Nicky slouching in a chair, about-faced to regard her with no barriers between them. He’d a schoolboy’s church pew posture—just lackadaisical in his suffering enough to be full of it—and grasshopper legs with flat shoes flung out wide. His insouciance was getting more and desperate. A ballpoint pen twiddled rapidly between the Toreador’s two fingers, bending time-space, rubber pencil trick. He had a tense look that tensed further with each question the Ventrue asked. He looked like a man who expected to dramatically protest getting ousted, or slapped.

In retrospect, that was not the exact body part he needed to protect.

She stood flagpole-straight, made of black lines, using a lay-around photography book as a clipboard. She drilled an index between her brows here and there; that’s all. She did not pause to take notations. Ms. Woeburne wrote as he talked—not to record the excuses, but to make herself remember everything she wanted to get him to say.

What he said:

 

 **NICKY  
** Whoa, whoa. Sorry, but—there’s just no rhyme or reason there, Seneschal. You can’t have evidence for that. Y’know why? Because it didn’t happen. If I can make a little recommendation—

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE  
** I recommend, Mr. Shih, that you entertain the possibility I don’t believe a word you’ve said tonight. And I _recommend_ that you do not make the enormously harmful mistake of assuming an inquest by a Camarilla officer—which, to clear things up, is why I’m here—doesn’t matter because it doesn’t occur in a holding cell. It could. If I decide it’s warranted. I’d rather be more direct than that, but if you’re insisting. We’ll do formal. I like formality. Would you prefer to do this in a facility downtown?

 

 **NICKY  
** No! Of course I don’t want to—go downtown. Like I said: sorry. It’s just kind of a shock to me that I even came up in a vague conversation about a car bomb, let alone on a suspicious persons list. I mean—it’s a _bomb_ we’re talking about. That’s not something I factor into my day-to-day routine.  It’s crazy enough, but now I’m understanding that you seem to think I maybe had something to do with you getting targeted?

Whew. OK. My head is, like… spinning, here. You think I told _who_? Who, _what_? And how would I have known where you were going to be on some random night you got a bug to stretch your bipartisan muscles? And why would I want to talk to a Conservative about anything?

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE  
**_Why_ , exactly. Could it have something to do with an extra-party arrangement you’ve made. A side of real estate. I know you’ve picked up the Bergamot sale. And I know how the Giovanni’s representative died.

Shooting someone isn’t especially difficult, Mr. Shih. But leaking a location is easy. Let someone else handle the body attachment. You did it to him; why wouldn’t you do it to me?

 

 **NICKY**  
Nah, no way. That’s a real reach.

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE**  
Is it.

 

 **NICKY**  
Can I just say something? This is going to make you mad, I’m sure. I’m going to go on and say it, anyway. It’s pretty clear you’ve got unfillable holes in your story. But you’re pissed, is what it is. Damn right, you are. I would be, too—if I almost got roasted. By Sabbat, no less. I get that. Except you’re not piecing things together too carefully, on account of that being-pissed thing. You’re stumbling on the gaps and using me to putty them up.

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE**  
I have the deed. I have witness testimony. You’re going to bet your freedom on a Seneshcal not doing her homework before she walks into an interrogation? You’re really going to sit there and lie to me.

 

 **NICKY**  
I nabbed Bergamot, sure. I’m not denying it! You don’t have to interrogate me. Because vulturing a property sale’s not… it’s not arrestable. It’s not even an offense. Bad taste—yeah, absolutely. Tacky as hell. I’m an opportunist; I’m tacky; I wouldn’t be handling money if I wasn’t able to turn somebody’s bad luck and dead rep into my good deal. But last I checked, opportunism isn’t illegal. Or we’d have a metric fuckton more Ventrue locked up in your facilities, doing some time.

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE**  
Except we aren’t discussing company ethics. We’re discussing your collusion with an enemy of this organization, and the degrees of treason I could or could not choose to throw at your brand new property buy.

 

 **NICKY**  
Treason? Are you joking—this is insane, Seneschal, seriously.  I didn’t collude with anybody. I made a vaguely distasteful business deal. The timing was terrible, I admit, and you can bet I’d think twice about signing that deed if I had any idea—

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE**  
You sank blood money into the Anarch State.

 

 **NICKY**  
You know what? Yeah. I did. Except it wasn’t blood money like you mean. If anything, it was whore money. And if you were Isaac, all up in my face about embezzlement right now, I’d be a damn sight sweatier than I am. But you can’t really care about that, Ms. Woeburne, can you? I mean, it’s just internal politics. Old clan drama.

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE**  
You knew about the de Luca case. You knew who we suspected. Who I suspected. You knew—because your people met with and followed him that night—where Nines Rodriguez was in relation to me.

 

 **NICKY**  
We need to take four or five big steps back, here.

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE**  
You tipped off a squad to wire my car.

 

 **NICKY**  
A, uh. A _squad_? I don’t have a squad to—

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE**  
You had the cleanest possible opportunity to close your tacky deal. Not the Sabbat. Not the Anarchs.

 

 **NICKY**  
Can you maybe, um. Not stand so close, here? I’m feeling a little—

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE**  
You.

 

 **NICKY**  
Look. You have no idea. You’ve got no idea where that money came from—or what those people might be doing with it if I don’t find a way to tie this—

 

And then it wasn’t speaking in ideas anymore. Nines Rodriguez was there, in the room.

He came in through the darkness beyond the back hall. There was nothing on the Baron’s face, and if you were in The Angels in this era, you might realize that little is more dangerous than nothing existing in the ghostly fluid behind a person’s pupils. There is no amount of acting and no blue and no length of eyelash that can cover-up nothing. There was no kicked-in door or a crash of glass. Rodriguez just stepped in.

Nicky immediately sat up straighter in his dinner chair. Ms. Woeburne did not even look up.

He’d showed before his time. But if a Brujah _gotcha_ could surprise S.W. by now, she wouldn’t have been a very adaptable corporal, would she. So it turns out, whatever her recollection is, that this night—The Night, if you want to be dramatic about it—both was and was-not how they’d planned. But it was—and this is the part no amount of unremembering can erase—one of those moments she will point to in answering the question of how things in her life really began to come apart.

“Not now,” the Seneschal said only—bit annoyed, but mostly past the point where Nines Rodriguez doing what he did could genuinely make her mad.

And since she didn’t look up, she didn’t see it, did she. Maybe she would have recognized that color-nothing, if she had.

What Ms. Woeburne remembers:

 

 **NICKY  
** Uh. Hello…?

 

And then she doesn’t remember anyone saying anything more. The Baron’s hand was at his coat and rising and it was full of a gun.

 _Well_ , she thought, all frozen and absent from her locked kneecaps to the static slosh around her brain. _That’s that. I’m dead._

They say, when you’re coping with a terrible loss, a person might engage in maladaptive running of numbers. This is, they call it, the Bargaining Stage. If you are the kind of person susceptible to bargaining, you may stand there facing the precipice as your front tires leave the cliff and your body is airborne and your brakes are stuck, unable to do much else but desperately figure out how things came to the way they are. As if, given half-a-chance to make a correction here-and-there to your formula, you could fix things. Reverse mid-air. Put your car back on the road. Make it all come out just fine.

And Ms. Woeburne isn’t someone who ignores numbers. She absorbs new data and re-tallies her risks. Always. Almost-always. But not that night. Because what’s the point, she thought, beyond beating herself up over some bad arithmetic. Win some, lose some. Don’t you. Be as certain and as well-planned as possible. But you can never _really_ be sure of your odds when you’re gambling with your enemies’ hatred and trying to pinpoint where on the scale you factor. All the blood was rushing to her feet and she could not try to move and she knew the look on her face must be awfully impotent about it. Nicky leapt up like he’d try to break, but who was he kidding; and his mouth was talking, too; but Ms. Woeburne couldn’t hear it. He didn’t exist anymore. The Baron didn’t exist anymore for her, either; it was just a pointed gun, that’s it, that’s all. She is going to die right here with a makeshift clipboard hugged to her breast and there’s nothing to be done about it at this point. Her eyes widened, maybe. She said in a small voice inside herself watching the bargain unfold and the muzzle draw up _you know what, oh well_.

And she doesn’t remember the moment of fire, actually. She just remembers the

 

**[BANG.]**

 

Brains all over the chair and the wall and Ms. Woeburne’s nice shirt. And yes—her clipboard, too.

Nicky must’ve whipped back when Nines shot him, because the bullet struck clean to the upper left quadrant of the head. But nothing else was. Clean, that is. The stucco behind him was instantly splattered and the table caught some, too. Ms. Woeburne flinched, shutting her eyes tight, still holding her notes. She didn’t actually take a step back. Thick people-matter spotted her crisp white collar, face, her neck and arms. It was warm. Fish eyes inside of her skull.

She opened them up again.

Reflex, is all: four steps forward on a shag rug, and here was the Seneschal, pouring on her good soldier knee over a pile of sifting bones.

What have you done, she said.

(A rhetorical, obviously. I mean, here we are.)

The Baron didn’t answer immediately. He was still standing just where he’d been, shoulder-first from the lights-off hallway. In his black coat, with his expression erased and his stare that howling January-cool, it was not easy as it might have been to believe he had really walked into your house.

No one screamed. No one moved. A zipper on his breast pocket caught different light when he took in the breath he needed to speak.

“I did the job we agreed I would do,” Nines insisted. His voice sounded the same, but not quite. The silence was sludgy, viscous, and she could feel it seeping up into her lungs. The Seneschal was ashen on her square of carpet, now looking up from the saturation of heavy, room temperature blood.

She is not sure if she spoke all these words or not. Maybe they never came out. She only remembers her lines are usually supposed to go something like:

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE**  
I did not. I did not ask you to do this. Not—not like that. You were supposed to wait. Not while I was— I wasn’t finished. I still had questions. He still had questions to—

 

 **NINES**  
I didn’t have the fucking time. YOU didn’t have the time.

 

 **MS. WOEBURNE**  
Stop! Stop. Just. Put the fucking gun down. You can’t—? You can’t just shoot people, not in my court, not without my signal. You can’t just burst in. You weren’t supposed to fucking— This was my—

I need to know what in the hell just happened. I need to know about—

 

Look out there, Nines said. Movement, finally—but it was ominous movement—not dreadful, ominous—full of omen. His one arm went straight through the space like a wing, or a crossbeam. He was pointing, she realized, to the pitch-black outside the locked front door. The pistol was still there in his hand.

Ms. Woeburne went to look. The Ventrue’s legs seemed like they ought to be shaking, frigid as it felt around those long, primal bones in her shins, but they carried her very steadily. She undid the deadbolt and cracked it. The chill at once soaked back in.

It had stopped raining. The sidewalk shone, and the jacarandas dripped, buds clinging tightly in hopes for a second bloom. She could see, far down a wet lampless side-street choked with hedges, Rodriguez’s truck parked where it was supposed to be. Out in front: one skinny black coupe

The driver window was out. There was no one sitting there. Not, that is, anymore.

“Called in a boy on you,” Nines said. “Rolled up ten minutes after you walked in. Took a little smoke break beforehand. Probably wanted to catch you on the way out. Fucker.”

 _You’re sure_ , she demanded. And then she said it again—and maybe another time after that. Because someone has to be. _But you’re sure._

“I sat there and watched him screw the silencer on.”

“And he’s—”

“Had to. Either way, by that point. Witness.”

Right, Ms. Woeburne said. Of course. You’re right.

She shut the door. Nines had put the gun away by the time she turned back to that horror house of a room. There wasn’t any blood on him, at least; he made a bit of an unfriendly face when she glanced his way. An aborted snarl, like she might come over to start an argument; it ended up more of a cringe. His eyes had filled again. A table, a lamp. A star-fingered palm in a red pot. A man in a coat. Some chairs. _Don’t look at it, pup._

Ms. Woeburne had killed before, of course. But this one was different. Or maybe it wasn’t so different, and there was the dread of the thing—the eye of dark matter yawning in the room. The thing is: Ms. Woeburne thought she had removed that other, older memory. Of a bare basement, and of the dead Anarch in a bleak, tiled room. Exorcised it. Bleached out the taste of his throat in her jaw. Forgotten the stickiness of tape catching dust. Scratched it out.

She put her hand heel up to her brow and sat numbly on the farthest far edge of that big wood table. It was freezing; all her skin was goosepimpled up. But the center of her head was a heat, expanding. _I’m sweating_ , she thought, clapping fingers to her nape to catch the runaway salt like you’d swat biting flies. But she wasn’t, of course. It was just a loose tendril of her dark hair, tickling. She covered her face with both palms and she exhaled, inhaled, exhaled.

Rodriguez was talking. Who knew what he was saying, or if he was telling her the truth. Ms. Woeburne only caught relevant bits, like: “—go outside and do a perimeter check. I didn’t see anybody else, but that doesn’t mean there’s no more bones buried around. And there’s no guarantee he doesn’t have a camera in here. Sneaky little shit. We need to check the place. Clean up before we leave. I’m going into the bathroom, start there. You can—”

I can’t, she said. I can’t think about this right now.

Woeburne, he said.

She was going to snap _what_ —because that’s the kind of thing she did—but when her hands came away, there was too much color on them. Some—chunky—red. And here is the heat in her skull sloshing over, running down her sides and her nose and her nerves that still worked and this isn’t her blood. This isn’t just blood.  Solids. Semi-solids. Conversion of forms. It isn’t true what they say; it isn’t gray, at all; it’s pink; melon-flesh pink. She wiped her face hard—too hard—but it wouldn’t do, and neither would her elbow, and perhaps nothing would just scrub things away anymore.

 _I have to_ —Ms. Woeburne knew, and pledged it, though her tongue and her teeth and her lips moved mindlessly, like breathing out.

She grabbed for something. Her hand came away with a fistful of legal pad college-ruled and the fibers turned Nicky’s blood brighter, spread its wings, when they touched her skin. Little residue drops like old gum chewed and chewed into nothingness. An unfamiliar black hair, a human flake. Paper cuts on her cheek. Nines was trying to hand her something. She snatched the fabric away from him and pushed her whole face into it, rubbing messily at the damp side of hair where some of the spray landed. Her blazer, she recognized too late. Dethreaded tissues. Aftertaste of duct tape. She really thought he was going to shoot her in the head.

“I have to get—this—off me,” Ms. Woeburne swore, throat swollen, hot with disgust. “I really. I really can’t—” Color, livid. It was there, wasn’t it. Even if she didn’t look. It was pineconed up the wall. The heaviest solids had gone sodden and sutured, like moles, her white shirt to her skin. “I have to—”

And she was turning, dirty; dirtier than can be fathomed; than can be allowed to exist; and she was moving; and she was banging halfway up the stairs; and she was already tearing her blouse away from her clavicle; and stitches were ripping; and she was not able to care.

 _Hold on,_ the corporal ordered—but her left-right-left up the flight was hectic and her badge out of sight and her voice? Bone splinters.

 _Not now,_ Ms. Woeburne shrilled. _Wait._

She ran. And lost buttons all the way up.

 

 **III**.

 

Fifteen minutes went. He found Woeburne at the top of the stairs.

Shih, as it turns out, had a backyard balcony fixed onto this echoey place in which he didn’t live. (Getting inside real fast would’ve been a little tougher, otherwise.) It was a low, cast iron-fenced, depressing concrete wing tacked on the master bedroom with no bed. There were no flowers in the garden beneath. Just weeds, and a limestone firepit nobody’d ever used. Drawers but no dishes. Bathtub but no soap. There’s nothing more Toreador, maybe, than a house gussied with luxuries having nowhere to put down your head and sleep.

Woeburne was out there past the glass door, smoking, dressed in a man’s split-pea peacoat she’d picked up off a hanger and tossed on. It doesn’t bear pointing out who it’d belonged to.

“Done,” she shot the second Nines slid the frame aside and shimmied out. There should have been some uncertainty at the end of that sentence. Guess she didn’t have any more question marks left.

It was cold as hell out here, summer and all—weird fucking weather continues—and the castlelike metal banister she’d propped her elbows on was the next-best thing to black ice. Didn’t seem to bother London, though, and Nines wasn’t getting close enough to a Ventrue over a steep drop to care. The wind had died out eerily in the past hour or so. It was just that cool leftover LA variety of humid, glistening wet, snow-without-snow, like winter should’ve been. He was glad for this leather. He hovered by the door.

“Done enough,” the Baron granted. The exacting green snake-eye that had flicked into her peripheral was satisfied, and flicked back. “Wall should be OK. I’m going to throw that carpet in the truck. Burn it. Could just come back later and smoke the whole house if you want.”

“Good. Yes. Fine. Let’s do that. What about cameras.”

“Nothing I see. You can check.”

That should’ve been a reassurance, suggesting Woeburne give it her seal. “Double-check my work” had put the company soldier at ease in fuck-ups past. But _no_ , she stamped. Her hair was wet, too—the brown too black, the knuckles too raw, the eyelids not black enough—like she had washed her scalp too rough in a sink, feeling each squared-off nail.

“No, that’s—I don’t need to. Go back down there. It’s—fine,” Woeburne decreed, scowling, porcupine quills just not into it, not sounding as though she believed herself this time. Her scary federal shine had come hastily unpolished. There was too much water in her veins right now to censor the record and lie. “It’s fine.”

The Ventrue took a fast, burning puff of her cigarette. There was still a little comma of blood over her right eyebrow she hadn’t caught, curling into the temple and getting lost. Nines didn’t mention it. He kept his back tight to the white-paneled house and the weapon against his ribs.

“That wasn’t like I thought it’d be,” London figured, dryly.

“It never is."

“I figured I’d—well, you know. Get something out of it.” Woeburne stood up straight, looked away from the unplanted yard, dropped her bare palm where her elbow had been. The bars trembled a moment. It seemed like their bite didn’t affect her at all. Scalding water in the upstairs bathroom, maybe. Sometimes these kinds of things just throw your thermometer off. “But it went too fast. It’s nothing, really.”

A chuff. She grimaced and forced some of that off-key humor out of the can, stomping one bootheel on the slick cement.

“Damn it,” Woeburne cussed as a joke. No real surprise—sharp spiny snakes’ll stick it out. Brittle, though. If those quills hit too hard, they’ll snap off or get lodged; they’ll kill you, all right; but they’ll take the snake out who wears them, too. “Nothing ever happens like I want it to. Company spy. It’s supposed to be espionage, extra-precision, super-tactical stuff, isn’t it. But here we have a go again. Bloody mess. It’s always, ‘ _yes, fine, yesofcourse, I’ve got it—’_ but who the hell’s got it, anyway? Obviously not—”

Except she broke off there, so Nines never did find out what it obviously wasn’t with Woeburne. That starchy ha-ha snuffed out. The Seneschal made the suddenly reticent purse of someone realizing she was only making sense to herself.

“It’s all talk,” she brushed off instead, shrugging her way back to the overgrown dandelion leaves and the mole marks in the suffering, squeaky grass. “And I never liked the talking. For different reasons.”

Honest—what can Nines Rodriguez say here, except: “I don’t know that anybody does, senator.”

There was a hanging planter shelf on Nicky Shih’s unused veranda, and that, too, was next-to-barren. If you peered hard at the cracked soil, too packed to transform into mud, you could just pick out a few long-dead sprigs of violets jammed through. Woeburne put out her embers in them. “You’d think you could make yourself forget all that background noise for awhile. Just eyes-forward and get the work done,” she figured. “But you can’t. It’s too much damned history in everything. That’s ancient and modern history, too. Bad blood, do you know. It’s too much. Right now, even! Still too much. You won’t be offended by that.”

“I’ve been letting you people offend me for a long time.” He didn’t notice it, either, Nines realized. His shoulders were flush against the window, and tilting unconsciously back into cold glass, jeopardizing the proofing of his coat, he hadn’t felt a thing. “I’m done.”

Woeburne gestured flippantly inside, downstairs, a flip-flop of one anxious hand. She snorted. Still a little wry. “Your way’s more direct, I guess. Can’t say much else for it.”

Then London didn’t say anything else for a couple of seconds—the time it took to rummage the cigarette carton out of the deep coat pocket she’d dropped it in. It rightaway slipped her unsteady fingers and hit a shallow puddle on the balcony. Cursing, Woeburne rescued it, dried the cardboard flat against Nicky’s lapel, and fished for another soldier. Nines got his back off the house before rainwet spoiled his jacket, and though he didn’t touch the railing, he stood near it. Nearer than he thought he would, at least.

“Do you know,” she side-talked him, clicking her shitty lighter, missed bloodstain still parked right on her head, trying to scrape some irreverence out of all this—and if anybody could. “This job. I hated having to talk to you, in particular, because you would just go _on_. You wouldn’t shut up. And look—you’re quiet. Now I’m the one who won’t shut up.” She bit down and got it lit in time to steal a handful of rushed breaths. “I guess I ought to thank my lucky numbers you didn’t drift a few inches left and blow me away, instead. Or too.”

And Nines is old enough and full of enough poison to resent this—and he does—but the more Woeburne talks, the more he can feel the workings behind the hard look with which he always addresses her reshuffle, just here and there. Most of the time it over-focuses and frowns like skepticism and sharp daggers and all that ancient bad blood. But every so often, once in a while, it’ll get messed with other shreds, too. It’ll tilt an inch another way. And it kind of canted one of those ways unfixably that night. He worried if you didn’t know better, you’d believe he was leaking some of that anger, and going instead a little concerned.

“I thought about it.”

“What stopped you?” Smart-assed bitch choked back a nasally honk like she was almost going to laugh. This is the sort of skip that has to make you feel a little sorry for her, despite every damn thing—that she was who she was, no other road to go down or other way to be. “I mean, I know what it’s like. What I’m like.”

“I didn’t start doing this thing yesterday. This thing, maybe, right here—but not you people,” he told her, though that went without saying, and with nothing else to do, his hand found itself on the black ice banister, after all. It wasn’t so bad. The temperature stung, but that’s mundane pain. Nothing you couldn’t will down. “I know it wouldn’t change a thing.”

And then Woeburne really was laughing. It broke out of her—a high, flinty, obnoxious sound—one that kind of scared Nines half-to-death. Not just because it’s no reason to laugh, living like she did—but because there was so much desperation in that eruption of noise, the only thing he could think of was jackals—minor wolves—childhood demons that turned out not to be demons at all—just hungry half-dogs crying out by the desert roads at night. Her death won’t change anything. She never talked more like an American devil than when she managed a permanent _no_.

“No! No,” she choked, positive. The moonlight couldn’t make it through to disguise that flash of teeth as anything besides what they were. “It wouldn’t. It wouldn’t change a _damn_ thing.”

Even if you eat snakes. Even if you gun down jackals. Even if you’re him. Are you supposed to smile at a punch line like this.

“There are two-dozen deputies waiting,” London concurred when he didn’t, swiping a wristbone over her eyes for some good-natured tears that hadn’t been there in ages. “Waiting, just for a day in this seat. They’ll probably do a better job. I can’t say. I wouldn’t presume. But in the meantime…” Arid red, those whites. Lacking anything else, she looked close at the burning endpoint of her cigarette. “In the meantime.”

He’s done preaching the word and connecting the dots for a while. Fill in the blank for yourself.

“But you know, I’m almost disappointed. That you didn’t try. I was sort of frightened for a second.” But she can’t be afraid of him like she used to be. You can’t be afraid of a man once you have seen the small bones that hold up his back, or watched his blood spread uncontrolled on the asphalt, or witnessed the broken steel making ruin of his body. It makes him too intimate to fear anymore. You already know, as you have known the yellow of those smallbones and the consistency of that blood, that this is a monster who can be destroyed.

“You thought  that, I’m surprised you walked in there. What would you have done?” he wondered—not with malice this time—but just since a Baron wanted to know.

She snorted. No doubt. “Gotten shot.” And then, a beat later, after a long drag and a pinch of hesitation she poured right down the drain: “Well, eventually. I didn’t exactly walk in like a sitting duck.”

He doesn’t have to ask anymore. He enters into a place or conversation with Woeburne under the permanent assumption. “There’s a gun.”

She made a face; and here it is: obviously. “Of _course_ there is.”

There it was, too. London reached into the oversized coat and, with a tape rip that’d make you wince (but not her), detached a sticky six millimeter from her stomach. It was a pretty rickety excuse for a firearm, not improved by the makeshift holster. She gave it a merry little wave around.

“Thin shirt. All I had room for,” she lamented, plopping the whole bundle on the desiccated violet stems, tacky with lint and glue. Chin-in-fist with her cigarette snug and her elbows on the railing. Woeburne pitched a sigh. “There’s always been a gun, hasn’t there.”

The rest of the duct tape came off in two painful pulls that absolutely left welts—the visceral, itchy kind you didn’t need to see to believe. She deposited it on the dirt like a dainty kid scrapes a glob of dish soap off her palm.

“Not much stopping power,” London admitted, cringing just a little as a final tendril came loose. It rolled easily into the other shed skin. “I’d’ve given you a pothole or two, at least. But what do you know. You, too,” she complained—actually complained, like she’d been born for friendly bitching right then, smoothing the heavy textile needlessly. She was a strange, worn-down sort of glum. “You’re not like you’re supposed to be, either. It’s all a let-down, is what it is.”

He had both hands on the cast iron now. Rodriguez leaned forward. The weather was toughening halfheartedly in an attempt to clear; the air went in thin and stiffened his lungs. A few stars blinked awake, but it was a useless sky. The ozone was still too misty out there to see all the way down a poorly-lit Hollywood street. “I could throw you off the balcony if it’d make you feel better.”

She huffed approval, mouth full of smoke and eyebrow up, but didn’t laugh again. “You could try. But if I was going to get scratched by a damn communist, I bet I’d have already been did.” All the held smoke bled out. “Suppose I’m relieved.”

Supposing is all you got, sometimes. 

“Listen,” she gave up, wrung-out and tired of the dance as a World War ace like this ever gets. “I’m sorry I crashed the ceasefire.”

Nines didn’t say anything. He really has talked too much.

“No. Really, I am.” London went back for her smoke, only to drop short when she found it had somehow ashed out. “It’s a horrible way to do business. A horrible thing. But you know.” She struck another. A cigarette—and also a failing, shabby grin. Kind of funny, Woeburne. Not in a way that’d make you chuckle. More a sad, sorry certainty of self. “I crash things. I have a talent. It’s my core competency. It's what I do.”

Surreal is just shared horror. It’s recognition of a world that is terrible and funny enough it can’t be anything else but true.

The Prince’s Child worried. She stopped looking for him. Instead, she looked for carlights or strange noises or another catastrophe down the silent lane, and breathed out all of her air.

What did we do, she said.

He didn’t miss the cue. It is an automatic system, what he says to shut down questions like this—defense like the firing of a cell. “We did what we—”

“Oh, come on. I don’t want an answer. I just—”

“Just _what_ ,” Nines snapped, not trying to be irritated, but knowing no other way to cope with third-thoughts. He did not have any speeches to face-down surreal, concerned, or unsure. And he did not have the capacity to hear someone like S.M. Woeburne sound so much like a person when she spoke.

Woeburne didn’t aim a glare at him and hack a snappy comment. She was too busy worrying, distantly, for the contest. Just sighed again, like he’d let her down a second time.

“What can I say?” She let the banister go. “I don’t know. I say I do, but I don’t. Do you know—I hardly ever have.”

One more pause tonight is all there’s the restraint for. No amount of chemicals or gasoline can really get the stains out of a house nobody lives in. Nobody honest forgets written centuries of bad blood.

“You leave first,” Woeburne directed after another couple of minutes. Brisk and closed to any other options. My-way-or-the-highway. There she is.

“What happened to I’m-real-sorry?”

She shot him a frank oh-please look. “I’m not _that_ sorry.” Her abused pistol plunked into a pocket.  “Not enough to walk in front of you out of a murder scene. I’ll do one more look-over. And then we are through here. Are you going to handle the arson? I could. But I’d rather not. I’d rather not put any more tracks in the grass.”

“We’ll handle it. Give me maybe three hours.”

“Good. Don’t call me.”

It was good as done now. At the same time, it was tough to move, after all this smoke and cold air. It’s a slow metabolism to recover who you are supposed to be. London had knocked off most of the shakes and was frowning at nothing special down below in the yard. Nines’s hands were still on the rail. She still had some death on her face.

Woeburne, he said. She looked without paying much mind.

He said: “Do you believe in ghosts?”

The Seneschal narrowed. Her head twisted around quick enough that a piece of damp hair hit the bloodspot and covered it up. “What?”

You shouldn’t be talking to snakes, anyway. But sometimes what you shouldn’t do gets eclipsed by what you just got to know.

“Never mind,” Nines conceded.

A gust of stray wind rattled them up just then. The cigarette was already flagging between Woeburne’s two fingers, and snagged by the breeze, its last bit of life winked away. _Shit_ , she muttered. When she dove for a replacement, though, there was only one left; it thumped lonesomely inside the box.

It’d been enough to breathe in for one night.

The Ventrue made her concession. She forked out the carton.

I don’t know about ghosts, Woeburne said, giving her miniature peace token a bland shake in the Brujah’s direction. That’s too many variables. Too much The Unknown. Too much mysticism for me.

But.

You know what I do believe in?

 _Bad fucking luck_ , she confessed.

He took the cigarette. For a little while more, nobody went back inside.


	79. Perspective

**TO: ASH RIVERS**   
**FROM: VELVET VELOUR**   
**DATE: AUGUST 29 2011 8:02 PM**   
**SUBJECT: YOU ASKED**

Sooner or later, darling, you’re going to have to answer the phone.

You know I wouldn’t be badgering you if I didn’t mean it. This isn’t the sort of thing that can be safely ignored, sweetheart. It’s unfortunate, but it’s the way business happens between people sometimes. You need to start making arrangements now, before the damage can really sink-in.  Sadly, darling, this part of Hollywood at least is nothing new.

“Typical” doesn’t help you, though. I still think it’s vile of him, of course. I’m as angry as any big sister would be to hear someone stole from her brother. But I can’t honestly claim I’m surprised. Without saying too much or hurting too many feelings, Nicky’s always rubbed me the wrong way. He was always a little too fast for my liking. I do have a special sense for people, you know.

I won’t waste my time or yours telling you what Isaac said, sweetheart. You can imagine whatever you want to—I know you will.

I wouldn’t be much of a sister if I didn’t slip in my advice. You’d rather not deal in the details, I’m sure. But if Nicky really did what every piece of the puzzle seems to be pointing to, darling—if he really did clean your coffers and pull a disappearing act—it’s not enough to just hire a new financier. Money can always be remade. I’d be more worried about what else a man in such a close position to your accounts might have embezzled. Codes, information, friends, secrets. We have too many safety concerns already, my dear. I know you don’t want to write an old partner off without a full story, but it’s more than possible he’s across the country or over the sea by now. If I were you, I’d change all of my locks. And anything else that needs changing.

Yes, I can recommend someone new for you, sweetheart. But I know you’re really after more independence. And I think you realize—deep down—there isn’t any more. You’ve got as far away from Isaac as can be, Ash. It isn’t very far. Everyone I have on my list comes first from him, too.

Of course I had to let him know, darling. You were in danger. No one can help you better than he can—like it or not. This is just Isaac’s world.

But it’s still ours, too.

So sorry he happened to you, honey. This town is full of predators. That’s one less false friend in your life, and out of your mind.

Call me, darling, please.

Love,

 

V


	80. Small Ships in the Night

Lily brushed the wet sand from her bellbottoms, hopped one treacherous-looking sewer grate, and stepped cautiously out onto a tiny plot of Santa Monican beach.

"Lil!" It was Jules who saw her first. The thin-blood's mouth dropped open, filling with cool, salty October air. He leapt from the circle of cargo crates and washed-up miscellany they sat upon, green-eyed blinking, bounding over to loop her in a startled hug. "Where. Where have you been? You just disappeared! We were start—start—we were starting to think the Sabbath got you!" he shouted, and she could see a piercing in his lower lip glisten spit. Lily wrapped both arms tightly around him and pushed her nose into Julius's shoulder. He smelled like an old cotton t-shirt and mohawk gel.

Before she could answer, the other two were upright and across their lot. Copper, awkward and overexcited, reached around Julius to clap one large hand on her back. Rosa's mournful brown stare became an expression somewhere between incredulous and sad. It felt like a movie. Really, it did, Lily thought, swallowing the fluffy swelling in her throat, not wanting to let Jules go.

The movie only lasted for a few precious moments, though. Then something made a noise in the darkness under the pier, and they broke apart, spooking at shadows, everyone wondering how fast and in what direction to run.

"It's nothing," Lily reassured them, clutching at Julius's ribs, peering as far through the mossy pillars as she could. "It's not anything. Just some trash washing up."

Copper—with her fingers still tangled in Jules's stretched-out shirt—ushered them both to the lowly simmering bonfire. Rosa had taken an unusual interest in brushing some lingering dirt off Lily's back; she took it as a Malkavian _I missed you_ and decided not to mind. Fluid built suddenly beneath her eyes, flooding beneath the bottom lids, stinging and wetting them all at once, and there was a distinct sensation of fizz running up her nose. She wrinkled it fiercely so as not to cry. Julius was still hanging onto one of her hoodie sleeves, and she still had him by the front of the tee—his hands grabbing for cornflower blue fabric, hers in bleached gray poly-blend. There was a little dried blood beneath his nails. Lily felt like hugging him again, but instead, she sat them down on a plywood cable roll. Sand had already worked its way into her socks and was itching between all ten toes.

"God, I am so glad to see you guys," she heaved. It whooshed from her lungs, the very deepest inside-point of her, entrenched there for so long that the words stunned Lily a little with their trueness. They had an aftertaste like hot cinnamon, comforting and sleepy. The sight of them all here together was like tipping a mug and getting that last warm swig of cider, an apple-sweet blooming along your throat. She sank forward in the makeshift chair, elbows dangling over her kneecaps. The apricot mess of her hair stuck to Lily's eyebrows, tear ducts, each corner of her mouth.

"Oh, man. What happened to you?" Copper asked, plopping himself down on the pit's edge. He sat only a wink before springing up again, overworn jeans crunching across their little corner of coast. Stubby hands, not all that dirty to begin with, scrubbed themselves moderately clean on the front of his pants. "You haven't been out here in, like—what's it been? Months? Months. And we were getting pretty worried, but we figured—you know—that you were real busy with your job or something. But then E showed up, asking if anybody'd seen you, and no one could get a hold of you, and…" He blinked, face as vacant and puppyish as ever, then swallowed, a shiver launching down his wiry back. "I mean, nobody wanted to say anything. Especially not, you know. To E. But we just sort of assumed the worst."

And though she knew Copper had not meant it to hurt, the name stung in a deliberate, persistent way, like a cleat stepping down on the back of her hand. Lily's smile plummeted, crumpled, and blew away; or maybe it fell into her, smacking her ribs, dissolving, a popple in the neonate's empty stomach. Of course E had looked for her; she'd known that, hadn't she? She had to have known him that well. But her old self didn't say so—didn't give-in either way. Lily rubbed a palm a little too rough over her eyes.

"It's a long story. I wanted to come. I wanted to see you; I really did. A lot of crazy shit has happened to me—things I can't explain. I lost my job. I ran out of money, so I had to sell my car. And most of my stuff. That's why you couldn't reach me. I'm sorry about it—just I was scared—I promise—that's all. I didn't want to drag something bad back to this place. But I missed you, all of you, so much," she swore, the first real honesty in a line of feeble excuses that didn't slam up a backwash of regret.

She had been scared, yes; she had been terrified, and plenty of times. But Lily hadn't come back because she'd been ashamed.

Julius, sitting with his back pressed into hers on their makeshift table, leant into it. He didn't speak—he usually didn't like to try—but showed that he missed her by squeezing a hand on her thigh.

"You are worn thin. You have been to Castle Rock," Rosa noted, tutting, gravely—but the instant she'd said it, confusion uprooted the sympathy on her face. Nervous fingers raked jet bangs sheepishly behind both ears. The woman always looked helpless when she prophesized. "And into the giant's tower. But I don't know what that means. So please forget it."

They ignored her obscure comment; it's what they usually did. Seemed the kindest thing to do. Like polite people when they hear an embarrassing belch, or when your friend's child throws a tantrum in a store. With nothing else to foretell, Rosa backed limply away from Lily, walking around their pathetic campfire. She pulled her eggyolk yellow jacket tight and sat cross-legged in a hill of sand. She looked like a befuddled kid. _Clean up on Aisle Four_.

"Dude, E's been worried sick about you," Copper told her, ruffling the ground with a rubber Nike. His black hair was jutting out around big raw ears. "He hasn't been here in, like, what—since summer—and that was only to check if anyone heard from you. The last time we really talked to him, he'd just gone looking for you over at some vampire bar in LA, and they acted like you weren't around. Basically told him to fuck off and stop asking questions. We figured it was bad news but he didn't want to hear that shit, so…" A gulp, a shrug; a sound that wasn't entirely voluntary and didn't quite burgeon into a laugh. "Well, I mean. You know what it looks like. You talked to him already, right?"

They stared when she did not right away say yes. Lily shifted uncomfortably under those three expectant gazes—doe brown, citrine, fishcrow black—pulling her hands into oversized sleeves.

"Not yet. We sort of had a fight," she muttered. This did nothing to deter those waiting eyes. Then, more quietly, a different kind of brush knotting in her throat, making the woman whisper, as though she did not want a baby to hear: "A bad one. Really, really bad."

"Lil, you've got—you have got—got—you need to tell him," Julius said, twisting around to look at her. The red handkerchief around his left leg had gone loose and was blown off their seat, but he didn't notice, or more likely didn't care. "E thinks maybe—" A tripwire syllable choked him, one he'd learned how to avoid before the word even started to snare up his tongue. "He thinks those Angelenos got you killed. And if you—if you don't tell him you're still OK, I—" He stopped and swallowed hard enough to shake it clear, knocking the words out, like a tooth in the hand. "I will."

"No, I will. I swear. I want to see him," Lily swore, wringing both hands together inside her large sweatshirt. She held her tummy, which was gurgling unpleasantly with how true that had been. "You don't know how bad I want to. But I want something to say first. I have to find a way to tell him how awful this has all been. And how I wish it hadn't happened. And." And how ruefully she regretted the string of choices that had brought her here, how innocent it had been, how curious, and how sorry she was. There was a lump rising and Lilly swallowed it. "If he comes over before I get the chance, you can let him know I stopped by. But I don't want to just walk up and apologize. I want it to really mean something."

Julius looked unsure.

Copper, though, was placated. "I'm still trying to get you guys splitting up through my mind," he said, not noticing how Lily's face twisted, or how she curved in as though to guard her stomach from a shoe. "We're just glad you're safe, you know? Man, we hoped, but damn did it look like the Sabbath got you."

" _Sabbat_."

She had corrected him. He stared wildly.

"It's the Sabbat. No H. Sa-baht," Lily said, sounding it out.

The beach went silent at the new information, not embarrassed, but perplexed, wondering quietly how it had come to be that Lily Harris—worst of them, littlest fish, for sure first-to-die—knew something they did not.

Rosa blinked away, for a moment, her private world. She was sitting on her knees, working a sharp stone, diligently scraping flakes of bark off a dry stick; it was like a kid making a spear; her twig went a bony, toothy white. "One of many," she said.

Lily watched Rosa for as long as she could stand it. The dark, dovelike face; the stern, reliable ministrations. They were too much to bear, and eventually, she turned her face away. "I guess there's a lot I ought to teach you guys about the whole vampire thing. I picked up a little," she volunteered, sure of it, but just ambiguous enough not to commit. "About us."

"Yeah, E said you got into politics." Copper finally tired of bouncing around the snuffed firepit, had burned enough of his springer spaniel energy, and settled atop a large rusted crab cage they used as an improvised lawn chair. "Are there, like, vampire elections?"

She couldn't tell if he was being sarcastic. "There definitely _aren't_ vampire elections. Not like you're thinking. There are plenty of vampire coups. And if I learned anything about vampire politics, it's this: The smartest thing you can do is stay away from them." (Maybe she shouldn't have said it that way, exactly, considering who had told her so. But it didn't seem to matter how she put it. That advice, at least, was good.)

"E said you joined a revolution," Julius remembered, glancing at his companion with soft, interested eyes the color of old peat moss.

Lily bit off a length of dry lip skin and exhaled through her nostrils. "Yeah. I really don't want to talk about it."

But he looked as though his curiosity had been piqued. Julius straightened, nervous hands curling together on his thighs, until the chapped fingers almost resembled fists. "I would join, too. If it meant we didn't have to live like — if we didn't have to scrape—if we didn't have to make it like this."

Lily hunched further forward, scowling at the white caps of her sneaker toes, until it looked like stomach cramps—until you would never be able to get a shot in at her vulnerable guts. "Except it's not _for_ us, Jules. It's not about us. Everybody out there has an agenda. Listen to me: there's no room in LA for what we are."

Copper stared at her with a distant kind of disappointment. The denim went ragged over his knees. "And what _are_ we, exactly?"

What could she tell them? Maybe no one knows.

"Look: there's nothing for you, OK? Stay away from them. They are not our friends. The Camarilla thinks we're a liability, the Sabbat will kill us, and the Anarchs…" She sucked harder on her bottom lip. The flesh purpled and threatened in pin pricks to bleed beneath the skin. "I guess they just don't care one way or another."

"What's the Camarilla?"

Lily closed her eyes. "Never mind, Jules. It doesn't matter."

And—because she said so—they stood looking at her in that same, unsatisfied silence, like children—like there was nothing else for them to do but wait around a while and hope somebody bigger would walk through the door.

Lily saw herself through Ms. Woeburne's eyes. It was a terrible moment. It made her want to take one step backwards one thousand times.

"I'm sorry," she blurted, wincing, grabbing her abdomen, making herself sit up right. Her sweater hood had slipped over; she pushed it back, making herself look, forcing herself to see them, the old tribe Lily had tried to leave behind. "Of course it matters. I'm sorry. I'll tell you everything, OK? I don't mean to act like such an asshole. I'm just—it's just been—" But her mouth was full of cotton. _'What, Lil? What have you been?'_ She rewet her leaden tongue.

"The Golden Ghoul," Rosa prompted, as though in answer to this question Lily had asked inside her head. Well-kept nails curled around the shell of her left ear. "In congress, always, with a quiet beast."

"What the hell are you talking about?" Copper snorted, what everyone had been thinking, the unkindness nobody wanted to say.

Rosa couldn't make it make sense. She dropped the stick, letting it roll off her knees, and clapped the sand off both palms sadly, sitting cross-legged on a salt-covered palm leaf that had washed ashore. Her eyes closed tightly beneath thick, pretty lashes, the ones that E always said reminded him of an oil brush.

"Never mind," she said. "I don't know. Never mind."

Lily generally tried not to hear Rosa. There were a lot of reasons not to. _She doesn't mean it. She doesn't understand what she says. She's not herself_. It's good to be kind. And she had tried to be; she had tried to befriend Rosa in those glimpses of normalcy—in the brief, sudden flickering of memories that did not forebode something terrible. It's important to give people a break. But it's more important, Lily thought, if you're what they are, to protect yourself; it's more important, if you believe as she does, to shut out what you need to, to dig your fingers in your ear canals and breathe out and let the doomsday verse go dark. Insanity can't always help what it does, Lily thought. Sanity neither. What does sanity know.

She watched a shadow banging down the beach tunnel—saw it transform, gradually, into something her sane mind knew.

"Oh my god," Lily said. It fell out and flopped like a fish. That's what she did when there was nothing else to do. "Knox. What the hell are you doing here?"

She stood up, made of eye whites and sand and the red freckles splattered across her nose. The ghoul panted on his way. When he found them, Knox bowed over and grabbed his knees for a second, sweat rolling between the auburn stalks of his hairline, smelling to a runt vampire like fear.

The small crowd of thin-bloods scrambled. Before they could run off, Lily thrust up her hands and shouted _wait_. "Wait! It's OK. This is my friend. My other friend."

They wavered like deer around her in the scraggly beach grass, under the moon. She turned.

"Knox," she said. "Why are you here?"

Lily had tried to forgive Knox. But even let-go, it could never be like it was. She'd never see him unexpectedly without the foretaste of suspicion, the harsh bulblight hitting from the deep recesses of her eyes; she would never forget the shape and the weight of a gun in her hand when it pointed at him. Lily expected a full accounting now, an explanation, a reliable timeframe in which he'd pop-out and pop-in. This had not been on the itinerary. So here it went: her anxiety flared, her face went to barbed wire, and he drew air in large, old-dog gulps, ribs heaving beneath his cheap windbreaker. The badge on its breastbone lifted and dropped.

"Time," Knox rasped, coughing on the dry eaves of his inner throat. "No time. No time to talk about it. Time to go," he said. He grabbed weakly at her forearm, catching fabric when she stepped back. Sand shifted. Whites glistened around yellow irises and the lustrous blackness of pupils in fatigue. "Come on. Now—like now—like right now."

"I thought you were with Bertram." It was an accusation. Lily easily twisted herself from his fingers. They could get no traction in the sweatshirt's bulky sleeves. She did not sit back down.

"I was—I just was," he swore. The tongue swept across Knox's upper lip, tugging in the bottom one. Lily glanced to her old group, feeling the uncertainty they felt, a thing leftover from a long time ago, remembering in her fingertips and toes how to always be this afraid.

"Sevens," Rosa murmured, clutching at her lapels, crunching them, blackbird hair tangling in her fingers, suddenly stomach-sick without knowing why. "Why are they counting in sevens?"

"Look, I'll tell you everything later. Important thing is that we have to go. I'm telling you. There's no—"

"Stop," she ordered him, jerking away when the ghoul made another reckless lunge for her top. "Stop. You're freaking them out. You're freaking me out. I'm fine. We—we are fine. Go finish your meeting. I'll meet you at home in an hour. But you can't be here. You have no—"

"No, no, no, no, you don't—" (Knox's head shaking on the bones of his neck) "—get it. Meeting is over. Way over. We are not fine and we have to get out of here right—right—right—" (The eyes, unblinking, pirate coins, staring and human and unable to see.)

She smelled it before she saw it, too: dark wood, a musk, animals, madness and wet blood and a knife in her gums and, always, decay.

This is the smell that, for this fish, in this city, means thinking with all that's left of her she is about to die.

This time it was a woman. That surprised Lily. They all scuttled toward the cold black autumn water when she appeared, melting out of a shadow where Knox had been minutes ago. The Sabbat had a wolf-mane, pitch and uncombed; she was wearing leather and skin like dog hide; icteric smile. She had a friendly little gap between her two front teeth. With this wide, bald-faced moon against her, rolling light back and forth along weak shoulders like fluid in a dunking bird, she wrinkled her face up, and beamed at them.

"Well, what do you know?" the woman hummed, satisfied, greeting them with that little smile and standing on the tips of her soft hiking boots. There was a poisonous quality to the spaces between her teeth. Iron-deficiency; bruised corners of chapped lips. The shadows her body cast on other parts of her body seemed blue. "We struck oil, Colt. Looks like Marcus wasn't jerking your chain, after all."

They would have run. This time, they would've. But whoever the Lasombra had been speaking to was now a solid entity, emerging from the tunnel behind her—blocking the exit, slamming the hatch, smoking the burrow. His expression was difficult to see beneath red matted stubble and one dozen old scars. But when he walked, coyote-like, ungraceful and chin-first belligerence, something inside Lily knew it, and screamed.

She froze where she was. Julius backed into the shallow surf; Copper and Rosa had gravitated, uneasily, toward a mossy ridge of sea cliff behind them, visibly calculating how fast they could get over the chain-linked fence and up the weedy hiking path. Knox did not move. He stood next to Lily with both his hands held flat at both his sides.

"Surprise, sur-fucking-prise," Colt scoffed. He sniffed the air and spat something mucusy onto the cold packed-down sand. Lily could not process the blunt nose, the battered tissue, or the vicious, particular yellow of Gangrel eyes.

She recognized the boots—steel-tipped, tapering, weak ankles, cracked with age.

"I thought I smelled something reeking up here when we came through last night." That plain, everyday grin was still there, torn across the woman's swollen mouth. She turned it innocuously on Rosa. "Well, well. This should be entertaining. Ductus says he wants the usual bounty. I'll take the pretty Chicana and Chuckles, over here." Julius made no sound, but his jaw flapped, unaspirated, chuffing 'p's. "Promised my boys, here, the rest. But I'm in a sharing mood tonight, Colt. You can have first pick. What you think we should do with this ghoul? Gut it?"

Colton shrugged, not particularly caring either way. The bleak, pale eyes honed on Lily instead. She'd first spotted his shoes; he recalled her watery smell. Now, asking, without really asking anything at all: "Don't I know you? Shit. Don't that beat all. Look there, Neskie—I almost had this one. Where's your Brujah boyfriend at tonight, bitch?" he jeered, bottom teeth grinding the backs of his tops, toothflesh in the salty air.

Lily didn't say anything to him. She wheeled backwards, then, placing the low-lidded bonfire between herself and the Sabbat. _One, two._ There were three more human shapes slinking through the backdrops, leisurely closing in. _Five_? Her hands went clammy and arthritic; they fisted, joints itching, not wanting to move. She glanced at Knox, waiting for some indication of what to do, how to behave, but he had nothing and stood petrified, fine hair prickling along the back of his neck. She glanced at her friends, who were not where they'd been a moment ago. Lily felt inch-by-inch run cold. Every nerve ending above her heart—one, two, five, seven—her knuckles turned tacky and slow.

"Wait. Heard something," one of the Lasombra's boys snorted, a limping and malnourished beast in a monotone gray. She looked back at him with doubtful, grudging tolerance.

"You heard nothing, shit-face. Always jumping at fucking rats," Colton barked, stomping whatever his partner might have said. She did not appear to like it. Lily looked at them all, bristling there, seven sets of fangs, reminding her of ferrets, wanting to take hers out. "You're going to pull yourself together and shut the fuck up," he snapped, "cause I _earned_ this."

Knox looked at Colton.

Colton did not look at Knox's hand, crawling gradually towards his pocket.

Lily looked, though—as the Gangrel took one step forward, and the ghoul tore a .45 from his coat, right arm shaking, pointing it at Colton's skull.

There was a hammer click followed by one loud, disorienting _BANG_. Before the Caitiff or the Sabbat could react, a bloody crater blew through one of their henchmen's temples, plastering scalp over everything around him. They scattered. Neskie whirled to face Colton, expression wild, sure he'd been shot in the brain. Copper was halfway up the bluff stair gate, his fingers grappling, mindless; his sneaker soles slipping, useless; his body unable to make sense of the wire. Rosa dropped behind them. Julius didn't move at all, shin-down in waves that broke, choppily, behind his sopping knees.

Knox was standing in the same spot, pistol extended, lids peeled back from the shock gold of his eyes. Colton's body did not fall.

Colton wasn't shot.

Lily's face moved slowly. It seemed like she had to drag herself, twisting her chin, pawing the sand, to look at the dead vampire as his body began to crumble, noting its impossible angle, and realizing, in that moment, that the bullet had not come from Knox's gun. He hadn't hit anybody. He hadn't even fired.

The Gangrel looked down at himself and took a few nothing-seconds to figure it out.

Nothing.

No blood.

Quiet.

Knox pulled the trigger and blew a hole into Colton's left lung.

Gunfire exploded down the beachfront. It sounded like everything and nothing at once.

It came from every direction you could guess. It was a supercell roaring in from the west. Red splattered from the shot Sabbat's mouth; Colton was propelled backwards, chest deflating. Gold glittered around them on the ground, appearing like rain drops. She looked for what felt like a long time. They were shells. Bullets stippled the sand, kicking up white spray, refined sugar. In front of her, behind the rest of them, flowering white eyes in the darkness, nozzle flash, lighting up the stretch of darkness beneath the boardwalk. She could not see faces. Fuck, somebody wailed. Anarchs. It's the mother fucking Statesmen up in here. Return fire. She couldn't see anyone. Pieces, plowed face-first into cinders, dissolving limbs; did she have hers? Copper's fence was blown compassionlessly off its hinges and he went flying into a wave. Their crude furniture went to woodchips. Rosa's knees had locked and three bullets ripped through her hands and straight into the big moon face. Neskie, shoulders riddled, bleeding haphazardly into her denim, liquefied into a crook of shade. Julius, on a mad race—over a mix of dirt and gore that looked like processed meat—making it six steps before the crossfire took him down. A slug ruptured his kidney and the body simply went over, timber, collapsing onto the spill of his innards. He struck earth like sixty pounds of eyed potatoes. His shoe popped off and went sailing towards the water. The carcass was gone a blink before the Puma. She never saw him again.

Knox, caught in the barrage, didn't bother finding another target. The ghoul balked and stumbled when his heel caught a conch. He spun around for cover and was riddled in the back with half a magazine, feathers shredding from his coat, scarlet at the base of his head.

Lily did not try to run. She fell flat on her belly, ducking behind the stout ring of cement blocks that held in their fire, hands clasping over her neck. Cartridges smacked into the slabs, chips blasting off. She curled up tight. Smoke soured the oxygen. Knox's loose gun cartwheeled overhead, clearing the pit, thwacking impotently on a smooth stone just left of the thin-blood's foot.

His body landed on top of her. He was dead before he connected with the ground.

Lily lay there until the shooting stopped.

She didn't move. She could feel weight pushing. She could see a clenched hand slung upward in her peripherals. It was cold heaviness, holding down, and it was some hot, sticky warmth, a bubbling, like faucet water. It moved into her clothes. It moved into the sand, coloring in holes beneath her, around the points of her, like Lily was a starfish, a piece of drifting wood, a broken off bit of a ship. She did not want to get up. She was too afraid to not recognize the face. She did not want to remember it in that look—the perpetual, hanging wing of terror, of eyes in the street, under a shoe, that open wide and start sucking because they know they are going to die

She waited. She listened for reality, something her sane self could put a finger on, for the sounds of surf and chittering seabirds and the wind swish-swashing over the ocean.

She lay there for an age. Five minutes; five hours. It didn't matter. No one came for her.

She couldn't think.

By the time Lily opened her eyes, Knox was not Knox anymore.

She did not look back at him. She rolled the body off her, stood up on wobbly legs, and breathed, counting, _one-two-three-four-five-six-seven_.

She was alone. She was standing on a ravaged spine of beach in the blue-black hours of night.

Lily picked up the gun and walked away, pressing footprints in the ash.


	81. Focus Out

Inés Herrera opened her hatch, sunk her fingers into the lapels of Colton's jacket, and—with her arms shaking in her own clotty, wet red—hefted her shot brother out of the minivan she stole.

Way too much blood, she told him, mind loose, teeth put away. Way too much. It seeped from his stomach. The backseat was coated in it—shed auburn hairs, sopping Kleenex, glistening brown meat that looked like chicken livers. Inés thought they were entrails. Inés thought it looked like a dog had died back here. The bullet had drawn itself diagonally through Colt's body, entering just above the navel and weeviling upwards, moving until it pricked a lung. Something coated the shell that smelled peppery. Something had made the guts of him look like a spent jack-o-lantern—like pulpy, pungent seeds. It steamed in the downtown air. It poured right through his undershirt, his leather jacket, and the shirt she'd torn over her head to tourniquet him. She stood there in her sports bra and muttered at it. It's too much blood, Inés said. This is way too much.

She'd plucked lead shards out of her left shoulder as she drove. An Anarch FMJ sailed straight through it, cleanly entering and exiting her body, bringing a nonessential but not insubstantial piece of her along. Whatever slammed into Inés hurt like a bitch. The muscle did not seem to want to stitch itself. She was tough; she shook it off. She could take it. She could see that it had gone into her and it had passed her by without leaving much of itself behind.

Colton, on the other hand—Colton, who wasn't too much, but never enough—had felt the metal spread inside him. That slug stank. Bleachy, chemical smells. The impact sent him flying into a patch of scrub grass. And, sidestepping, Inés had dragged him out, beneath an aqueduct, then through a sewage access pipe that opened onto warm parking lot concrete uptown. He bled the entire way. Bled like a hog. _"Like a stuck goddamn hog,"_ she remembered him saying, a grunt from once-upon-a-time, kicking the eyeless corpse of a blood doll suicide. Inés did not have a lot of options. She had punched through the nearest driver's-side and taken a Chrysler Town  & Country. It was _champagne gold_ _._

And then she had simply popped the rear and rolled Colt in. Pellets had been pushing themselves out of her skin and hitting the floorboard before they sped out of Santa Monica. Not him. He was lying there, curling, kicked hound, stuck pig, still bleeding, losing himself, fluids sluicing the car mats. Inés kicked the license plate off the frame, tossed it into the gutter, and raced.

She drove as fast as she dared with her vision curly-cueing and the spit souring to a vomit-taste in her throat. They nearly rear-ended a Honda—then, shortly after, killed a mailbox—before reaching Main Street and swerving toward Hallowbrook Den.

The front entrance had been boarded over years ago, when this old boarding house got officially stamped derelict. Their pack moved in shortly after and kept it that way. The termite-eaten façade drove off nosy humans, confused the smell of piss, made it look like a wreckingball date. So Inés hauled Colt around back, beneath the unsuspicious lean-to, up a flight of concrete stairs, and into the dilapidated foyer, where the rest of this pack would be waiting for them.

One of his hands had smeared all up and down the faded leaf wallpaper. Colton was considerably taller than her; his steel cowboy tips scraped the floor. She'd nearly dropped him in that narrow, peeling stairwell—one of her Timberlands hit a splintery plank and sent them both spilling forward—but Inés recovered. Inés was not going down. Not with Colton on top of her, and not on her own. With this man slumped over her back, weighing her down, she slogged up to the second-level lobby, unhelped; then she wrestled him into a battered couch, trying to breathe, remembering she did not have anything to catch.

He painted the sofa cushions—thin, sticky bronze into rot green. Now it was too much and not enough. Too much outside of him, and it kept coming; not enough left to come like it had been a few minutes before. Inés felt odd here in the middle of this room, under the worn picture frames, stout carriages holding Victorian ladies; beneath the asbestos-packed vents and walls swelling with insulation; inside the place, creepy-crawling with ants. Colton didn't say anything to her. There came a pissed-off, boarlike snort every once in a while that let her know he had not died. His torso was curling in on itself and the hinges and winches of it clenched—and every time they did, more of him trickled out, spread over the world, depleting what concentrates a person, leaving him papery like the skin inside an unhatched egg.

This is her friend. She could have murmured some comforting lies and stroked his hair, but she didn't. Marcus would kill him if the napalm didn't. She said: you lost way, way too much.

Two of their packmates had been skirting about the wings of this room, lounging in the leftover armchairs and swollen plush, when Inés heaved Colt in. One slunk away while the other darted past them and through a ramshackle door. He was headed for the Ductus, no doubt, and she tried to swallow that building thickness, the threat of puke.

Inés had not wanted to bring Colton here. She wanted to hide him somewhere. But Colton was dying, and there was no other place to go. No secret-safe place where he wouldn't have been found, anyway. There was too much to smell of him scattered around, dragged through this city. As much as she loved Colt, which was too much, and as much as she did not want to love Marcus, she had to; she did.

Small crimson bubbles were at Colton's nose. His tongue was all the way out. The shape of his body had slathered her back, washing the cat bones of it. The ache in her deltoid didn't feel like anything anymore. She thought seriously again about giving him another drink of her blood. The first, when they'd limped sloppily to the escape van, had barely been enough to wet his gums. It wouldn't matter, she said. It was too much, and Marcus would tear her throat out with his fist if she shared without permission in his house. It had been some seconds. It was too much time; it was a sure thing; Marcus already knew.

Marcus Torres had let Colton King go after the last bad run with both of his ears.

It was not a good sign.

It meant that, when the Ductus arrived minutes later, Inés abandoned Colt in his ruined loveseat and pressed her back submissively against a far wall.

"Where the fuck is everyone," Marcus wanted to know. He paid no immediate mind to the wounded soldier slung into their common room. Colton was draining like a cracked wine bottle. Three shovelheads had accompanied him in—Johnny, Sal, and Burgundy—little spitzes jumping along at their master's heels. They could not sit still. They were sucked in by the way a Brujah moves when he knows he is in charge.

They all looked indifferently at King, as though he were a piece of scenery. A throw-pillow.

Inés glanced up from her saturated shoelaces to the tarnished brass chandelier to the ivy patterns to the empty bookshelves to Marcus's shadow on a broken grandfather clock. His mouth turned downwards around fierce long teeth, spray-tan face unsoiled and glossy in the dim light, clothes cotton and clean. There was an air of expectancy about him that lifted her fine hairs. All that muscle mass, waiting for ignition. Because no one answered him, she did.

"It's just us," Inés said, chin tucked to her chest, watching Marcus's dorsals from beneath her black shutter of bangs. The pack shifted. They forked across this gaping, echoing room, curtaining it, moving in strips. She felt her arteries standing out on her belly skin.

He spun on her, hornet-eyed, wide and focused—yellow on black—lips open just enough to taste the air. It was hot and damp. Inés felt like she was staring down a wolverine. Spit ran bitterly down her throat again.

"The lead was a set-up. We were ambushed. On the beach. Outnumbered. I think they baited us," she said, emptied, automatic, sick, loyal, somehow not herself. The Ductus's expression did not shift one micrometer. "Everyone else is gone."

Inés gulped dryly, unsure if she should keep talking or not. Marcus's frozen stance unnerved her. He was like a pointer, or like a wolf. But in no way did she hope his face would change.

"It was Anarchs," she said, as close as could be figured to the truth. "Couldn't tell how many. Five, six M16s. Hit us from the back. They had heavy firepower. It was too much. It was way too much. We couldn't—"

But the Lasombra stopped talking, as she was saying nothing, and Marcus lost interest sentences ago. That look, that hunter intention, hadn't dropped. It merely switched. It exchanged Inés for Colton, who couldn't muster the attention to respond. He bled. Sal and Burgundy, stupid omegas, stared because their Ductus had. Johnny kept watching Inés; his eyes were hazel, unblinking, and hovered as though waiting for her to do something, something that would merit his action, but no one could say what.

She did not. She looked back at her feet. She focused out.

Marcus strode over to the couch. He took that space in five long, smooth, rower lunges, aggressive in how fast and calm they were. Colton flinched meagerly into the tattered cloth. That's it. He wasn't much by this point. He was not what he had been this morning, when they had picked out their guns, punched at each other, laughed, and left. He had given up most of himself.

"I told you, meat," was what the Brujah said.

Inés felt her stomach go. She slid down the ivy wall.

Colton moved his hands. One palm picked up, like the sun looked too hard in his face. There was blood between the fingers. The old scars leathering his cheeks wrinkled weakly, dull teeth flashing in stale air. It was a gesture of submission, a formal surrender in an earlier language, one you had to be able to speak if you lived here.

But Inés wanted Colt to fight. She wanted him to find a way to get up off that shitpile sofa and growl. Or run. Or do something—anything, really—anything that Johnny looked at her and thought might happen—anything besides lay waning and ashen at the feet of a pitbull coming to make you pay. She didn't want to sit bowed against this wall. She didn't want to see his flesh come undercooked off the bone. She wanted something she could think about. She could think about this last moment as something to not-talk about, to have for herself, in the privacy of one chamber of her heart, a release of hatred bitten back for years until it tasted like love. She could see it again and again. She could have this to look at in the back of her skull when Marcus turned the whip on her next. She would not have to know Colt had been too licked to struggle. He would not have to die on his back.

Except he did. Marcus bared his fangs, jerked his chin toward the couch, and laid first blood with a scratch across Colton's sallow unseeing eyes.

Because he did nothing—and because she knew she couldn't—Inés lurched up. She felt like fog. She threw her elbow into one side of the Brujah's face.

"Back the fuck off, Marcus—" It was all prayer and no conviction. Sound fractured in her throat. The Ductus took the hit. Blood spurted from his hooked nose. Her eyes were large and dark, dark brown. "Fuck you—it wasn't our fault—this is too much—it's too—"

She wasn't able to finish because Torres gruffed an order and Johnny shot her in the back of the head.

Clotty, wet red. Black mist out of sable hair with a loud, flat _bang!_ Half the body went to shadow; half dissolved to oily black flakes. Snow. She fell in deer spots on of this big old ugly rug.

Colton fell out of the loveseat and ripped his fingers into the weak chub skin beneath Marcus's ribcage.

They tore him apart.


	82. With a Scorpion Attached

**TO: SEBASTIAN LACROIX**   
**FROM: MAXIMILLIAN STRAUSS**   
**DATE: SEPTEMBER 19 2011 6:01 PM**   
**SUBJECT: REQUIRING YOUR ATTENTION**

Dear Prince,

 

Your acquisition of the Ankaran Sarcophagus has not gone unnoticed by your peers. Nor has it evaded the attentions of whatever masters those many peers may serve.

I tire of engaging with the mercurial and bureaucratic pretext of an ‘Antiquities Department.’ My resources have made it indubitably clear to me that your intention has long been to privately secure artifacts relating—or purportedly relating—to Noddist lore. To what end—this is more nebulous.

And troubling.

I would be very interested in meeting with you and your esteemed advisors regarding this acquisition. It is, of course, well understood that you are a busy man. For our remarkable extramundane circumstances, I am pleased to meet at your convenience.

Ignoring this interest would be most unwise.

Permit me to also mention that I am aware of Beckett’s presence in Los Angeles. He is, however, a difficult man to triangulate. Provided Beckett is able to make time away from your ongoing research project, I should like to speak to him in confidence, as well. Please pass my message on. And please, forgive me for the inconvenience.

Your silence is the most telling whisper of them all.

Regards,

 

MAXIMILLIAN STRAUSS


	83. Two-Faced Ghosts

"Hello?" Nines asked, but he already knew who it was.

" _Spray-and-pray is an acceptable tenant of socialism now? Ideal. Terrific. I'll keep that in mind."_ London's tone was paper-thin and pepper through her nose.

He wasn't too surprised by her lucky guess, but he was confident in the cover-up job. So he held the phone up to his ear, propped his bootheel on the wall behind him, and kept the open line. Because it belonged to his shitty apartment, plaster flaked off and spotted the wood underneath.

"Spray-and-pray," the Baron sassed. "Ventrue, when you call my house, all I do is pray."

" _Go to hell,"_ she said.

Nines scraped at the paint specks with his toe and was mildly annoyed when they didn't disappear. Long white checkmarks across the floor. It was 5:24 PM and there was nothing to eat in the icebox. October—this is the time of year where the nights settle early, and the black dogs all rise, tall-haunched, speaking ghost language, impatient for food.

"It's not your concern. Not everything is."

Because that was bound to go over like a water balloon full of astrolite:

 _"Fuck you. I woke up tonight pointblank to a casualty report. This isn't supposed to 'concern' me? Fuck you, Rodriguez. What do you think I do all day? Do not. Do not answer that,"_ she warned, clean and quick and arrowheaded, until Woeburne was, OK, a little scary. _"We are not fond of police attention. Opening fire up the beach from a terror site is what you might call attracting police attention. And it's funny—it is—because I was completely surprised when I got this report. I was, you might say, underprepared. Caught off-guard? Blindsided? Uninformed? Left in the dark? Smacked in the back of the head?"_

"And if I have no idea what you're talking about," he wondered, halfhearted, knowing that was about as likely to work as _who, me?_

" _This is not the night. Trust me. This is not the night to test my patience with you."_

The Seneschal yelled at you sometimes. He hadn't heard her angry but for that one time, though, which was a time Nines did not care to remember. That memory was of some other animal. Barracuda animal, shark eyes, snake shot at the throat. It made him think of teeth snapping. He wouldn't mind never seeing that species of Ms. Woeburne again.

"Hold on a minute here," Nines balked. The cramped desk stood across his dingy room with a phonebook and a list of Santa Monica numbers he'd circled. The sometimes-working TV screen reflected him in glossy, distorted black. "You're screaming at me why? I didn't get you to sign off on the dotted line? Didn't bring in my permission slip? Do YOU tell me everything YOU do?"

" _What I do doesn't involve a shootout on public land belonging to a politician you are required to placate. Do you have any idea what kind of conversation I just had with Therese Voerman? I am not screaming. Therese Voerman was screaming. Therese Voerman threatened to slap my diploma off my wall. I won't be able to approach her again for months. You closed one of my avenues. You made a mess,"_ she told him, no uncertain terms, _"I cleaned up."_

Nines paused.

"I'm real sorry," he said.

" _Do not fuck with me, Rodriguez, I swear. I will stomp you like a fucking bug."_

It was absolutely serious. It hit like a hammer on a brick. Woeburne paused a minute, too.

" _We got off on the wrong foot,"_ she observed. Not exactly a retraction, but a rudder lean, a sure application of weight in some direction she thought was better than this. London was not feeling trapped like she used to. She was on firmer legs now. But Nines knows that, even in the open air, even let-go, even on their own land on a safe acre, these little black snakes are the ones that'll go right for your eyes. " _Let me start over. How is your night. How are things."_

"Why don't you tell me why you're calling?" the Brujah suggested.

 _"I'm giving you a warning. This is not the time for your people to play fast-and-loose with Camarilla law. I obviously don't criticize a hit against the Sabbat. But as your Seneschal and as your…"_ (Associate? Liaise? 'Partner' was presumptuous, but 'advisor' would offend him.) _"Your peer,"_ she decided. _"Let me be absolutely clear. If there is another rash of gunfire in this city and I have reason to suspect you are operating outside your precinct—"_

"Domain," he corrected.

 _"Precinct."_ The Ventrue's insistence was deadly. He did not argue about it. He could see her sitting there _—_ middleweight generalissimo at an overlarge darkwood desk; in harsh, military lighting; pens on papers; jaw set; able to feel every tooth in her mouth. And he was glad not to be in that room with her. When London got mad in that sleek, Guantanamo way, she'd lean forward in the seat, press onto her toes, cock her head right, big bird of prey. You would start to feel your adrenaline climb. You got the sense Woeburne would outrun you _—_ run you down. You could watch the dive-instinct tighten in the blackest point of that green reptile eye and almost believe that there was nothing you'd do and nowhere you'd go she wouldn't see. _"You will not get a warning from me. You will not get my patience. If I turn up your handprints on our territories again—whatever for—I will file an injunction, I will push forward with what comes, and we will_ _not hesitate. I will deny everything. You understand what I mean."_

Rodriguez hadn't liked Woeburne touting about, calling herself Seneschal _—_ as though that title meant anything to him, as though it spoke well for her, as though her growing pains promotion wasn't anything but a streak of nepotism to make life easier on a Prince _—_ but she hadn't meant to provoke. When it got a certain way that made you think _the thing is an air strike_ , _this woman is a machine, she does not make a mistake,_ you had to remember Woeburne on parking lot pavement, trying to pick herself up. You had to remind yourself how her head looked snapping forward; how the those hard lines went to static; how she buckled under herself in a coffee shop, knee folding, blood glugging out of her belly and her thigh, slurring _I'm fine, I'm fine, I am fine,_ like if she said so enough, it would be.

Nines frowned. He removed his shoe from the wall and stood straight, abandoning the patchy stucco, forgetting he had ever tried to smile this down. "Is this a threat?"

" _This is a one-time courtesy,"_ she corrected. He didn't like her tone, the way you can hear every syllable she has, tell exactly where the vowels and the consonants went wrong. _"I will say this once. Do what you will to control the Sabbat. But cover your tracks. Because if I find them again—if I find them across our borders—I won't be calling you beforehand. I won't be calling you, at all."_

There was a somber pause.

"I appreciate it," Nines told her.

 _"Yes,"_ was all London said.

The Baron felt himself begin to pace. But there wasn't enough room choked-in between these cabinets, wedged in the kitchen corner, so he crossed the place and pawed his phonebook off that table. Nines had never set foot on that beach. He had been in Hollywood with Baron Abrams's alibi and in the company of three neutral witnesses. There was no cell phone camera. There were no victims around to argue they had seen an Anarch face. He had given that no-survivor order. All she had was hunches, a good guess, and those returning ill feelings.

" _But I don't recommend sticking your neck out on that side of town any time soon,"_ the Ventrue sliced in, unaware of how relevant her advice was. _"Therese Voerman will skin your people alive if she catches them, with or without my testimony. And I wouldn't count on my testimony."_

 _Bitch,_ Nines mouthed, but thought better of it, and swallowed the whole thing down.

A threat, likely _—_ definitely a complaint _—_ but was it bona fide rejection? He'd made a proposal, delivered an action, and she'd responded with a warning shot. It was not the ideal response, but it was a legitimate, direct response; they'd gotten her attention again; and though it's dangerous to dance over a cobra, to make it pick up its head and squint, if you're careful and fast, you can sometimes get a cobra to bite the adder behind you. It's a brother-eating kind of snake. It won't help you, not on purpose _—_ but it might, if you're smart, and if you're quick, if you can smile just the right way to make it look appealing, be convinced to see a bigger serpent as nice, easy meat.

Could he make that happen? A good Ventrue Seneschal taking a bite out of a Prince's cabinet _—_ lend some space, feed some information, get them a foothold, give him a little more time? Curious proposition, but one he was liking the sound of more and more since her promotion.

A cobra will handle another snake for you. Then _—_ when it's over, and when it's eaten, and the victor's fat and slow on serpent flesh _—_ you're not in a bad position. Then you only got to kill the one.

Maybe Ms. Woeburne is that kind of a snake.

"About that. I have a plan," Nines announced, but didn't get much farther-than.

" _No,"_ she said, automatic, sounding tired, a deadpan oh-please. _"Stop talking_. _"_

"It's a pretty good plan," didn't do much to convince her.

 _"I'm sorry—does 'no' translate with you?_ _Did you hear what I just said? You do not want me to know about this. Stop while you're ahead, thank me for my patience, and hang up the telephone."_

Baron LA was not quite ready to throw in the towel on this. He dragged over the folding metal desk chair and sat down in it, keeping a thumb stuck in the yellow pages. "It doesn't involve your Prince or his claims."

" _I don't care,"_ she snapped. Woeburne didn't want to know details _—_ and that's natural _—_ since once someone chucks a Ventrue some juicy leads, says a couple fishy words, they are obligated to hunt each down and stomp them out. That's predatory instinct. That is what you call a biological imperative. _"I'm not interested. You might mean it, but I have serious doubts, and what's more: I never asked for a coalition with you. That's an old news bargain. I told you before: this is not a joint council, and it's not being officiated—not any more. So don't stretch my tolerance. You secure your quarter of the city—you people have already shown us what that means to you—and I'll maintain ours in the way I prefer. Besides, I don't have time; I've got a meeting with the Regent this evening, and that's more than enough to worry about without indulging Anarch 'plans.' There's an oxymoron for you."_

There was a familiar, awkward, foot-in-mouth silence, long enough for a Ventrue to grimace at having said something non-conducive to her cause.

"Why the fuck do I persist in trying to talk to you?"

" _Meditate on the knowledge that you are not my favorite person right now."_

"Look, Cam," he pressed, laying things out as simply as possible. Ventrue don't generally trust what seems simple, but Woeburne's got a talent for understatement; what she'd really said there was _I'd like to punch you in the throat_ , and that given, this was the only sure way to prevent her from slamming down the phone. "You and me have a mutual problem. Party problem and a personal one. You know my people have been hitting the Sabbat on the home front for months _—_ and considering what you and me just went through, we've upped the ante considerably. But the outposts downtown are useless. They're bunkers; closing them down doesn't shut off the influx from the burbs, and that's where they do their heavy weapons trade. You know that. You gave me the report."

" _I recall. Distinctly. Go on."_

"And that report was helpful. To a point. But knowing where they set up shop doesn't mean I can get at them with our territory lines the way they are, especially not since the ceasefire bit the dust. Here's what happens: We torch a den close-by, and everybody in that den scatters out to the boonies for a while. I can't touch them; you can't find them _—_ month or two passes, trail goes cold _—_ same bunch of rodents come back, new guns and new troops. What am I supposed to do with that? What are you? I cannot deal with a city of this shit anymore and keep my streets in one piece. So what I'm saying here isn't that different from what I imagine Therese Voerman said, except I'm nicer than Therese Voerman. Therese Voerman, by the way," he threw in there, just for good measure, and because it was true, "who continues to dick everyone over about this. The only reason Santa Monica is a Sabbat stronghold right now is because she got too busy politicking your Prince to handle this issue in a responsible way. So I've worked something out. Before you bark at me, listen. I am aware you've been taken off the case. But this needs to get done, and it will benefit both of us. I mean it will help out LA, yours and mine, and hey, Ms. Seneschal _—_ it might just save your hide."

" _Oh, sure. At what cost to my life expectancy?"_

"Why do you always got to assume the worst from me? We are talking about pest control, not war. There's no hidden ace here, Cam; there is no need to involve your overhead. More than that, it'll be easy on you _—_ I'll only need your hand in a peripheral sense. Granted, you may not love the details. But I recall you did not love being blown up and shot."

He stopped for a minute to wait for her nasty comment _—_ but in the afterburn of those bullets, the sticking limp, the realization she could not just kill, but be-killed _—_ it didn't come.

"You are aware," he resumed, glancing down at a single flagged line on the dog-eared page, "that under my predecessor, the Voermans used to be Anarchs."

" _Are you educating me on political history? Let me save you some time. Yes! I know who Jeremy MacNeil was. I have read the manifesto. Browder, Potter, Goldman. Hurry up."_

"Then you know they jumped ship like rats. I spoke to Therese maybe three times in my life. I have no idea what her political preference is. I do know that her allegiances blow like a weathervane, and that is no kind of neighbor to have. That is no way to run a Domain. And I think, with a little convincing, Jeanette Voerman would feel the same way."

He was right: Woeburne didn't love the notion at all, you could hear her eyes rolling, her lip curling, on the other side of the line. _"_ That _is your pretty good plan?"_ the Seneschal snorted, a long-distance you-should-know-better. _"Rodriguez, even were I the littlest bit amenable to your suggestion: we can't trust Jeanette Voerman to abide by or remember anything she says."_

"London, who in the hell is talking about trust? I don't trust Jeanette. I don't trust YOU." He unbalanced the book from his hand, set it back on the desk, and, for lack of anything else to do, stood up. The cheap chair creaked. "I never said anything about trust. Fact, I'd sooner trust a baby to a Bishop. But can this work out for us? I'm thinking yes _—_ at least until a time we decide that dealing with a Voerman isn't worth it."

" _She's the whore little sister of an impotent ex-Baron,"_ Woeburne observed, a blasé, smart-assed grin.

"Didn't stop you."

" _Whose fault was that?"_

"I'm not shaking my finger. It was a smart move. And it's obvious, at least to me, which Voerman is really running Santa Monica. Therese is so caught up campaigning, I don't think she even understands how serious the Sabbat situation is over there anymore. And if I know anything about her, she's not terrible likely to accept suggestions from your office _—_ not with her constituency downtown, and not with sights on a cabinet seat. It'll embarrass her. Woman's a fucking pacifist; she's a bureaucrat; she doesn't have the stomach or the firepower. Or the people-power. But if I can get Jeanette seeing eye-to-eye with us on the Sabbat issue, then—"

London worked it out for herself. _"Smash the hubs, find their suppliers, strangle their trade. It's not a bad move, in theory. It isn't, you know, illegal. Per se. Understand this conversation is purely hypothetical: but. Where would I come in, so to speak?"_

That's the window he's been waiting for. "It's a small job _—_ well within your resources _—_ but it has to be done, and I can't do it. Here's the gist: We arm Jeanette against Therese only so she can get our foot in the door out there. We don't give her enough for a takeover bid. I'm not _—_ and I think you will agree with me _—_ optimistic about letting that headcase run around without surveillance, whatever her affiliation. You can take care of that for me. It's in both our interests; the Camarilla can keep tabs on her political activity, and I can be sure she's not going to stick a knife in my eye without looking like a double-agent."

" _Ah—let me get this straight. You want information, but don't want to take the risk. And you imagine I will. Oh, where might I have heard that one before? That's convenient. That's familiar."_

"I realize. But this works. You work. Voerman finds you out _—_ the Camarilla are spying on her? _—_ I mean, well, of _course_. No shit the Camarilla would be spying on her, she figures. No harm, no foul. You smile and apologize and fob it off. I still got my deal. We work out a Plan B. On top of all that, there's also the bonus of you being able to track Anarch movement in the area. And your Board knows Therese is worthless to them, anyway. They won't miss her. Just saying."

" _God, do you talk a lot."_

He shrugged it off, guilty-as-charged, kind of funny since it was such a Woeburne type of disgust. "Somebody has to control this thing, senator. They are a big goddamn problem over there, and ain't shit been done about it. Even with Shih out of the—"

_"I know. I know."_

"Shih left a huge fucking mess for you, in more ways than—"

She tripped, and _boom_. Not a boom—not really—it was more of a catch and a sharp, sulfuric, firecracker snap. _"I KNOW,"_ London shouted, then stopped, breathing out so stiff and loud you could hear it over the line. _"Will you—stop. Just—stop talking about him,"_ she suggested, frayed now, ahemming the cracks out of her throat like nobody'd heard. _"I don't want to hear the name."_

Nines didn't have anything for her here. He really did not. "It happened. It's history."

 _"I know, I just—_ don't _, all right. Talk about it. It makes me anxious as hell."_

He didn't.

 _"Just let me,"_ she said. _"Just let me think for a minute."_

You could practically hear Woeburne's cogs whirring and processing _—_ running tests, exploring scenarios, hunting for deceptions, patching the loopholes. She still didn't like it. But he could tell London was intrigued by the prospect of monitoring Anarch development through the lens of Santa Monica; it guaranteed her exclusive access to Free-State traffic, remote as it was, and thereby increased her ability to make good on some of those _tell my daddy_ threats.

" _I don't conspire with Anarchs, so I promise nothing,"_ she swept, more bluster than anything else. Rodriguez laughed to himself because this, too, was such a wrong and predictable thing for Woeburne to say. _"But. For now: do whatever it is you're planning on doing. You may contact me afterward with updates. If it suits me and it doesn't offend my organization, I may consider abetting you. If it does not suit me_ _—_ _depending on how much it doesn't_ _—_ _keep in mind that I cannot guarantee my silence."_

"You say that like I don't figure every word I say to you ends up in a stack on LaCroix's desk. Do what you got to do tonight, Ventrue. All goes well, we'll be in touch."

" _I'm sure."_ She chased the condescension with a scoff, a joke all to herself, sounding like she had a secret. He waited for her to hang up the phone.

" _Rodriguez,"_ she said, after a while.

"Woeburne."

" _Have you even met Jeanette Voerman?"_

"I never had a reason to."

" _Would you like my strictly professional advice?"_

"I'm all ears, senator."

" _Disinvest her sister. But don't attack her. It's true what you said about their feud, but you don't get the character of it. Jeanette Voerman wants ammunition against Therese; she wants to undermine her, not overthrow her. That given, it doesn't have to be particularly damaging ammunition, so long as it's personal and it is embarrassing. Oh, and don't piss around. She's got a short attention span. Don't bore her. Don't get had."_

"Noted."

There was a hesitation. _"And I don't know if this is pertinent,"_ Woeburne added. _"But on the off-chance: she has a weird thing for the English."_

Rodriguez laughed. "Thanks, Ventrue. I think I can handle it."

" _I have every confidence,"_ she clipped. With nothing else to report, the Seneschal signed off with one last _ahem_. _"Goodbye."_

He waited again for the click-down. It didn't happen.

" _And Rodriguez,"_ Woeburne added. The Brujah chuffed.

"What, Woeburne."

" _Don't leave her alone with your drink,"_ she snarked.

Then London hung up in earnest.

 

**II.**

 

Later that night, after tossing the cataleptic body of a distracted valet driver back into a car and wiping his mouth, Nines decided he'd waited long enough. He isn't averse to biding his time in theory, but some situations want patience, and others just don't get anything out of extended pissing around.

So, glancing up a dark alley of downtown Los Angeles _—_ making sure nobody outside of _Thai Kitchen_ had seen him jump this poor kid into a Toyota _—_ Rodriguez crossed Fifteenth Street and ducked into the first convenience store he could find. The place was tiny _—_ shelves overpacked with junk food, leaving no room for your elbows _—_ but he didn't come in here to shop. Neon green Spanglish over the door advertised a public phone. The weather outside was breezy and cold, but the Anarch's stomach was warm; he felt a little bit optimistic. He bought a carton of cigarettes, today's newspaper, and one bottle of windshield fluid as a pretext to find a quiet corner and call _The Asylum_. (Well, and because he needed the windshield fluid. But Nines didn't really want the Voermans to have his private number on their caller ID.)

Theirs had been scribbled on a piece of college-ruled scrap paper and crammed in his jeans pocket. Once he got a ring, Rodriguez threw it away. He listened for an answer. The cold glass doors of a liquor refrigerator captured his image sidelong in a way that made Nines oddly uneasy. It made him look like nothing, like vapors. Something that might melt. It made him look less solid. He looked at the floor instead.

The answering machine had just kicked in when someone picked up. If it was Therese, he was going to dial tone her.

" _Salutations!"_ someone said, way too happy to be a wannabe Prince. _"Guess what? You have The Asylum and you have your host. It's your lucky day! What can I do for you?"_

"Jeanette Voerman, right? You got a minute to talk?"

Jeanette Voerman didn't recognize him, though _—_ and why would she? _"Of course I can manage a minute for you, whoever-you-are. Directions, information, reservations? A valid credit card number? Did you just want to hear my voice?"_

"This is Nines Rodriguez. You feel like doing a favor for me?"

The fun and games screeched closed for a moment; he heard Voerman's absurd grin lose its pep and fall. When she spoke again, it was a good deal quieter, as though she was worried someone might be leaning up with a shot glass against her door. _"Nines Rodriguez? LA's own Free-State scourge. What a surprise! Sure I can spare a little time for my old neighbor. But I don't know about a favor. Unless you want a cup of sugar or a nice firm handshake, they usually call favors for Anarchs sedition from where I come from. Sissy doesn't like me playing hardball with the grown-ups anymore,"_ Jeanette sighed, sing-song air an attempt to cloak her earlier stumble. His calling had upset her, made the woman nervous; it was an uncertain variable, unknown territory. _"And I definitely shouldn't be talking to you."_

"Sedition for talking to me? I ain't that bad. You know, I vaguely remember a time when the Voermans called Santa Monica Free-State."

" _Sadly, our allegiances have changed since then."_ It was as good as a pat on the head. His early optimism was cooling off fast. Baron LA did not take kindly to being belittled and he didn't much like being flirted with, either. It felt like she was making a joke.

"Your sister's, or yours?"

" _That's dirty fighting, mister, and you know it. A Baron is not a popular figure in Santa Monica right now. Seriously, Mr. Scourge: this can't be news. We've had some publicity problems lately in my little old town. We've had all guns and no roses. Oh_ _—_ _and Therese was Not Very Happy about the mess on her pier last year. She was not very happy with you people, at all,"_ Jeanette remembered, clicking tongue against sharp teeth. He rubbed at his beard and tried not to mouth off out-of-turn. _"And, wull… to be just so brutally honest with you, Ninesy, I think if you showed your face around here, sister dear would shoot it right off."_

"That so? I'm not scared of some kiss-ass Junior Princess, thinks her temper tantrum is going to make somebody change their mind. She can't do anything to me. And to tell you the truth, I'm frankly kinda insulted you'd mention her when I called to talk to you."

" _Tough talk, Rodriguez, but if you tweak Sissy's nose, I'm the one who has to powder it up again. So let's make sure we understand this: Want to cut cards with me? It better be worth it. And you better be worth it. Because_ _—_ _and you should know this ickle fact about me before we do any business_ _—_ _nothing makes me madder than a tough-talk Baron who wastes my time."_

"I didn't plan on making a grand entrance. You got a backdoor, don't you?"

 _"Spoken like somebody who is no trouble at all,"_ she snickered. Then, on an exhale that sounded tired, and not entirely enthused: _"All righty, Baron. We'll meet-and-greet. But no bringing the bullyboys to my party. I don't like bullies, and I don't like bullets. Understand?"_

"I understand."

Jeanette's frown seesawed into a grin; you could hear the fakeness, the meanness, in the words. _"Foxy Boxes across the street at 1:20, then. I'll leave a key under the mat for you. Don't be late, or you'll hurt my feelings."_

Nines checked his watch.

"I'll be there," he said, and hung up the phone.

 

**III.**

 

The Brujah took one look at _Foxy Boxes_ three hours later and decided to keep his gun.

Maybe he was paranoid and maybe he was only realistic, but that building gave Nines chills in a bad way. It looked unassuming from where he'd parked outside _Brothers' Salvage_ : a redbrick with metal garage doors that opened onto sidewalk, eyed with two murky windows, each with a shadow of security bars showing through the cobwebs. Padlocks on the main entrance, rusting out. Dark, unclean glass. There was nobody around it and looked to be nobody inside.

 _'Two bucks says this whole thing is a set-up,'_ Nines thought, scrubbed at his face, exhaled, and got out of the driver's side with a pistol tucked under the back of his shirt _._

The side door was unlocked and there looked to be an overhead LED on, so he walked in.

True to its dumb name, the place was an oversized storage facility; it was stacked floor-to-ceiling with duct-taped cardboard and plastic economy crates, looking vaguely dangerous piled one-on-the-other, like one shift would do this house of cards in. It smelled like spider spray in here. One long hallway, and he was in it; there wasn't a lot of space; shelves clung on the walls like mushrooms on trees, jammed with postage cartons, freight labels, packing peanuts, tubes of bubble wrap. He had to slide sideways between them towards the nearest door.

Nines tried the office, but it was bolted. He squinted in the dark and took a look around.

It was a calm night. But every time the wind hitched, suggesting, as it always did in Santa Monica, sudden cold rain, shutters rattled. The Baron tried to be quiet. There were security camera warnings everywhere, but no actual tech.

Only one direction to go if he didn't chicken out and leave the way he came. The corridor opened into an echoing shipping dock, but he couldn't quite see what was down there _—_ not in all this bleak gray paint and the thick skin of dust. Somebody'd been through recently, though. They'd turned a bulb on. He couldn't see exactly where it was from his current angle, but got a crust of the stale yellow light, peeking around the threshold and making a few metal racks glisten dully. Motes tinkled in the stale air. Those uncomfortable feelings would not subside.

Nines didn't want to go strutting down a ratway and toward the single bright spot. But there was nowhere else to go. He took out the handgun and let that mildly reassure him, edging farther down the dim hall, weapon folded in his palm.

When the Baron stepped out, he saw nothing at first _—_ then whirled around at a squawk and nearly shot Jeanette Voerman in the kidney.

"I thought we went over this?" she snorted, and he said Jesus fucking Christ.

Junior was perched atop a large second-story outcropping just over the door he'd walked through, dismal windows looming behind her, a flimsy guard rail between them. She stood like a little boy with crisp white running shoes, spring green laces, and fists propped angrily on the large bones of her hips. "You're getting off to a bad start, Baron. First impressions are so important, too, so I'll give you another chance. Empty the gun," he was told, and that nasal voice sounded more vicious than it had over the telephone. "If you don't want to play nice, I'll lock this place down and call home."

The backlight of moon made her look bluer than seemed likely. She'd worn a crumpled button-down, had not tucked it into her denim cut-offs, and it looked, from where he was standing, like Jeanette could easily be carrying a pistol or two of her own. There was a fray of yellow around the painfully white face, parted down the middle into two halves. Between it, that mismatched stare was surrounded with old eyeblack, and it made her look inappropriately warlike _—_ not what she was going for, he was sure.

Much as he hated it, Nines saw nothing else to do; he held out the gun and opened the catch. She watched the magazine hit concrete and clank uselessly.

"Good work!" Jeanette's sneer relaxed. There was a red flick on her incisor, maybe lipstick. "Now be a pal and pitch it here, would you?"

She was trying to intimidate him _—_ else why would they be meeting in a dusty old death trap, full of spare parts and claustrophobic edges? Creepy fucking lighting, too. In a way, he admired the effort, though it made him nervous. She was probably just being careful, but fuck that. He picked up the dropped cartridge and lobbed it to Jeanette with a bit too much strength.

She watched it sail overhead with no reaction, bouncing off the shatterproof glass. She did not attempt to retrieve it. Her green and blue eyes followed like a bored barncat.

"Was that so hard," Voerman asked him, and when they turned back, rolling over in the socket, Nines felt all the hair stand up on his neck.

Unfazed, she blinked, combed her pigtails over to one side, then plunked herself down, right on the edge of that wall. Her legs swung through the railing, elbows hanging on the top bar, chin propped sweetly on her two stacked hands. All evidence to the contrary, she looked about seven. "No _w—_ and not that I don't appreciate the cooperation, Ninesy, because I do _—_ I really do _—_ obviously, I didn't mean the clip. You could always have more ammo. I was talking," she whistled through the front of her teeth, "about the gun."

"I don't."

"You _could_ ," she noted, whistling it louder, up the throat and through the nose, a tone she must have known would gnarl his temper into a knot.

Mood sinking, Baron LA _—_ much more gingerly, this time _—_ tossed the pistol. She caught it like a girl.

Having defused him, Jeanette dropped a few of those wolf quills, letting her cherub cheeks smile again. It was Nines's time to stare with some cold flint in his blood. She studied the Eagle briefly, hefted it, clicked its slide, then _—_ one eye shut, pink tongue stuck out _—_ took mock-aim.

"Pow," she said. An imaginary bullet spun straight into the space above Rodriguez's nose.

The Anarch did not find it amusing. Jeanette must have noticed, because she plopped the fifty caliber onto her lap, laughing, cackles in the trees. "Look at that face! Don't like being on the other end of the barrel, do we?"

It was hard not screaming at her. "I came here to discuss business with you," he got out. "If you're going to screw around, I withdraw my offer."

"Lighten up," Voerman suggested. "Don't be such a big old Brujah sourpuss."

She set his pistol down beside her with a reserved, polite _clink_. It idled there for a while.

"A little business doesn't mean I'm trying to wheel-and-deal you, Baron. That might be the Ventrue Way, but it's not mine," she said, about as straightforward as you could ever hope to get from a snake _—_ especially this one, who spent her nights suffocating rabbits and chasing her tail. Jeanette must've recognized that being cute on him was useless; she was far more concerned with making sure the Baron-next-door didn't smile in the windows only to kick shut the door and bite out her throat. "I swear, you are being so mean to me, Ninesy. After I forgave you for bringing guns to our little heart-to-heart. My delicate sensibilities are in a twist! Incidentally, sweetheart, ask yourself: What would two little girls like us have to gain from killing you, Mr. Rodriguez?" A pause while she thought it over, casting those wide, maniacal eyes upwards, the glass-blue and the baby-leaf green. Could you reason with this? Maybe. It wasn't vipers, and it wasn't the brilliant shade of diamond-backed, wait-in-the-grass snakes. But that green eye wasn't _right_. She bristled bad voodoo. She liked the sight of a stranger in her town less than half as much as she put on. "I don't have any interest in that, sweetie. I'm not Miss Therese. I'm a little more practical."

A mongoose smile in the low half-light; a pigtailed child who put toads in her sister's bed.

"So what did you want to talk about?" Jeanette asked.

"No. First we deal with this. You clearly want insurance, and it's not unreasonable, but you don't pull scare tactics on me." Nines Rodriguez says No Way. Nines Rodriguez will shut it down. "I agreed to meet on your turf; that is your insurance. We don't do the rest of this your way. I want some lights on. I want this spooky shit stopped. Right now."

"Oh my. Big Brujah Baron, scared of the dark?"

"Jeanette, do not make me ask twice."

"Hmph. Fine, then."

She stood up, about-faced. A short stroll to the far wall under those windows behind her; a key from her pocket and an opened control box; the power lit up. It made some horrible sounds, made the Brujah skitter in his tough black coat. After the clinking and clanking, there was a long, sleepy mechanical hum that flushed out the place, and then: white. The blare of the overheads blinded him for a second. Rodriguez was left squinting, vision struggling to adjust; he looked down at his hands, trying to see something, figuring his hands may as well be first; he knew where they were. Quickly, the knuckles, the fingers, the wrists came back to him, but nothing looked right for a moment. It looked like ash. But it was just the lights _—_ the lights he'd asked for _—_ a little too much at once. Nines had been washed as colorless as everything else around him: crates, shelves, the ladder that led to where Voerman lorded over her sad little throne room. Ceiling fans turned with slow, bladelike sweeps in stagnant air.

She returned to her seat with shrunken pupils and slight annoyance. There was no one else in the depot. They were alone.

"Better?" Jeanette asked, flippant, not bothering to hide the distaste. This time, she propped herself on top of the rails, winding her ankles through, sitting like you might on the edge of a fence. Her shoe laces were too loose and dangled. You could see all of that powdered, terrible, moonstruck face.

"Better," he said _—_ though he might not have thought so if he could see himself, bleached like bone, eyeskin made into flat steamed iron. "Let's talk."

"Well, I'm not coming down!" She flicked one hair tail, like her terms were a sure, tutting thing. "Lucky for you, I'll stay, because you're bright enough to know that kissing Sissy's ass is waste of time. But no cheek-to-cheek, hound dog. You can stay right there and bark up my tree."

Rodriguez didn't miss the chance. He turned an argument right-angle, shoving the shadows and the flood lights and the kidnapped gun out of the corners of his head. "You want the reason I'm paying you a visit? Police, Voerman. This city has got a major security problem and I could use some help with it. Now, we're meeting pretty late in the game. I realize," he said, "and I'm sorry for that. Your sister's been calling the visible shots around here and she's a Cam. She was a Camarilla even when she wasn't. But if you know who I am, you know I don't give a shit about their titles or borders or claims. All I care about is that _—i_ n my State, with these people, the way it stands right now _—_ I got suits and I got leaders. Therese can say whatever she wants. She's a suit. I'm hoping you're the leader."

She scoffed. "You don't need to butter me up, Ninesy. Santa Monica is her city. But the real people here on the streets and in the cars and with the houses? They're mine _—_ or, at least, they're not hers."

"And if you want me to make that happen for you in a more official sense, I can," Nines told her. It was an obvious and grandiose bribe. "Your sister runs her district like a Prince. She micromanages, throws money at people. That shit doesn't work. The way things stand in this town, it should already be an Anarch State. You want that State, you want to be the seat of it, then I need to know you can keep a hold of it when-and-if that happens."

Jeanette looked a little offended by his spiel, because her knees stopped swinging, and her arms went stiff when both fists clenched around the rail. "I've got a _hold_ on it, Baron. I've got just as much of a hold on Santa Monica as she does. Trust me _—_ I understand your war on the Crown over here. Things have changed for me not unlike they've changed for you; I'm just on a slightly different wavelength. I've got family to consider. I used to really be somebody, Ninesy. But the more Therese thinks she's got to please this pouty little Prince, the harder she squeezes me. I'm working under her picket fence already _—_ I've had to _—_ she's building towers in the way of everything I try to do. To tell you the truth, I'm worried about her. I'm just concerned for her safety!"

Nines snorted. He leaned his weight on his back foot; his folded arms were a challenge. "That so. Well, you're doing a shit job of it. I don't care who's in charge around here, Jeanette. What I care about is fortifications, patrols, whether my State and its territories are defensible _—_ and it is _your_ responsibility as Princes or Barons to keep this Domain Sabbat-free. But it is not Sabbat-free. It is not defensible. You've got packs raiding your beaches; you've got the Black Hand doing business outside your back door," the Brujah barked. "You might think that doesn't concern you, being who you are, who your sister is. But it does. It concerns you. If you all don't do something _—_ not tomorrow, not next week, not when you get around to it _—_ now _—_ those little supply lines are going to grow so deep into your infrastructure that this place will crumble, whether I sit you or Therese up as top-kick. Shit needs to get done around here, because it sure as fuck is not being taken care of now. Do you understand?"

"I heard they almost bumped that Brit few nights ago," she observed, a simpering little subject-change. Her fingers toyed with the splintered end of one pigtail. "LaCroix's girl. Almost fleeced her right off. Or _somebody_ did."

"That was not me. I have said this already. It has been resolved."

"Like I care. I'm just pointing out that it's an interesting circumstance. It's a coinky-dink. A bomb goes off, a Seneschal gets shish-kebabbed, a treaty gets dropped, and _poof_! You're knocking at the door, tossing pebbles at my window _—_ all of a sudden! _—_ you're right here, being oh-so friendly, burning to talk about Sabbat with little old me."

"That was not me," Nines swore. His voice went spur-heeled in a way that sounded like this statement had been said a hundred times and could be said a hundred more. "That was not my people. We had nothing to do with it."

"I never said you did. I just said it's interesting _—_ and, if you've been paying attention to what the Primogen are saying, Mr. Baron, it's _very_ interesting. They say _—_ " Jeanette stood up. She detangled herself from the safety rail, wandered over to those bleak barred windows behind her and poked around, shuffling through dilapidated boxes and spools of rope, until Rodriguez was angrier with the disrespect than the taunt. Didn't matter to her. He ended up snarling at her backside. "—that you're risking Hollywood's vote. They say Abrams, if asked, might not find this little coincidence so interesting, might not want his name next to yours. Might be a little bit awkward for him. At least, that's what they say. They say look at the facts! There's a shot Seneschal, there's a big Five-Oh fuss, and there _—_ right there at the sidelines, ready to cry _Sabbat!_ _—_ there's you."

Having found whatever it was she was looking for, Jeanette stepped gingerly back over the sprawl of crates, watching for splinters, moving through dust. The magazine was clenched in her left hand.

Nines was grinding his teeth. He unset them, swallowed, and felt the phantom stinging in the large wolf muscle of his jaw. "You heard they tried to frame me for it? That never would have happened when Los Angeles was under my thumb. Shovelheads got no business scheming like that _—_ and they wouldn't be able to were either of you doing your jobs. They would not have the resources. They would not have the time."

"Are you scolding me?" she asked him, standing right on the wall edge, white sleeves, fat buttons, ripening her bottom lip. "Are you telling me," the vampire asked, "what to _do_?"

"Honey, I am just trying to be clear. I do not care what the Primogen say. But let me make this real apparent to you: I am not happy. I'm not happy, there's a problem."

Jeanette, facing him down, stared for a while. She blinked real deadpanned and slow.

She puffed out one big, tired, are-you-serious sigh.

"Well, then. Let me make _this_ apparent to _you_. I can play second fiddle once and a while, Baron," she said, stooping, and plucked his handgun off the floor with the cartridge in her other hand. "And I get it. It's a change of pace. But." Inexperienced digits fiddled until they managed to find the magazine catch. She loaded it with an awkward bump of her palm heel. "There's a fine line between being my friend and being dead to me, Nines Rodriguez. You might want to take one or two steps back from it if you want to do business."

"You might want to shake my hand if you had any idea how many of those bloodsuckers are roaming your streets. You're a burb government; I do not expect an army. I do not expect riot squads. I'm not asking you to smoke them out yourselves. But you're damned right if you think I expect you to clean this shithole up, one way or another. And I expect you will listen when I say this: it is very smart to be my friend, Jeanette," Rodriguez shot back. She noticed him notice her explore the loaded handgun and pouted at his lack of reaction. "Here's what I'm thinking. You let me and my people in under Therese's radar _—_ quietly _—_ and we'll take care of the Sabbat problem for you. We defend our own; that includes the provision of soldiers and access to our arsenals. Hell; you sign with me, and I will personally make sure you have everything you need to keep the Cam _—_ including your sister _—_ out of it. But the question here isn't if you want Santa Monica to go to the Anarchs. I will drag it there one day soon with or without your approval. The question is where you want to be standing when that happens."

"That a threat?" she bawked, and Nines mentally stumbled at hearing his own words repeated in this used-to-be-dark room.

He did not want to make an enemy. This wannabe Baron was a little bit crazy, but she was nowhere close to being crazy as she put on; this was a barncat that didn't sit around nicely licking its claws. She could conceivably cause problems for them, bloody the water. He folded and unfolded his hands into fists. He did not wince or smile.

"Jeanette, darlin, that is a _promise_."

They paused, mutually disturbed.

And then she made a face; she goose-stepped one leg over the edge, like walking a plank; she held out her foot, and let it hang.

"Fine," Jeanette proclaimed, nose airborne, one half-step from being over the platform and on the ground. Her pigtails dangled behind her head, looking like a trapeze artist, looking seven and twenty-seven, like something surreal a sicker person might like to paint. "I'll dance to your war drums for a while, Comandante. I'll even believe you can deliver what you say. But I do have one teensy-tiny condition. When you marchers finally take over this show, I want your special-solemn guarantee: Our dreary old side of surf stays with me. And Therese does, too." A malicious, carnivorous wink. She rotated her ankle, swirling the foot. It was incredibly childish and irrationally off-putting. "Don't swear unless you mean it. Break my heart, Brujah, and I will break some things of yours."

"I have no intention of stepping between you and your claim. When I'm through with this, you turn Santa Monica inside-out for all I care. And you can deal with your sister however you please."

She finished the step, and she dropped.

"Well, then," Jeanette Voerman said, bounced the hair out of her face, and grinned at him, sweet as sunshine, sunny like a kitten with a goldfinch in its mouth. "Looks like you have yourself an accomplice, Mr. Scourge. I'll talk to Bertram Tung tonight about finding your soldiers a safe house and some back routes in. And call me sometime, will you? We can't be very good neighbors if you don't keep me on your list."

"All right," Nines told her, and forced a good-neighbor smile.

She stuck out her paw. It was full of the gun.

He took it back, put it away, and Baron LA shook a Voerman's hand.

 

**IV.**

 

Considering, the Baron was less irritated than he could have been to get in his truck and first thing call Ms. Woeburne.

"Still mad?" he asked when she answered. She said take your _best_ guess.

Rodriguez hadn't wanted to dig around for his phone while sitting, like a duck does, outside a Voerman property. He found his keys and got out of there. And now, having left the underpass that took him out of Santa Monica, Nines had only one more step before tonight went on his list of recent successes, which had been, by the way, pretty short since London showed up last year.

"Down set," he told her. "Are you in?"

She _ugh_ ed.

" _Off we go, then. I take it Voerman was receptive."_

"About as much as I figured she'd be. Which was a little. But it's taken care of."

 _"Peachy. Please spare_ _me the details."_

"Is that what you think of me?"

_"I try not to think of you. Ever."_

He tried not to smile. "You're real mean, you know that?"

 _"It's on my file. As for 'in,' I suppose your plan_ _—_ _using the word 'plan' charitably, here_ _—_ _is workable. I'll take care of your oversight issue,"_ Woeburne swore. And yes, she was mean, but not chaotic, and there's nothing worse than chaos when you're trying to hold down a Domain. London was predictable. You could guess, with some degree of reliability, what she'd say and what she'd think and what she'd do. _"Let me make arrangements. Give me a bit of space, too; you don't want to be seen or heard speaking with me while I go about this. I won't be in touch for a few days. Also!_ _Believe it or not_ _—_ _"_ She tossed it in. _"—I have other things keeping me busy than dealing with you. But it will be done."_

 _"Just give me two nights,"_ Woeburne said, blew off 'goodbye,' and hung up.


	84. Natural Selection

The child was covered in sand.

Some days had passed since the incident on Santa Monica beach—sun rise and set—but Lily couldn't make it home. She couldn't make it anywhere. She didn't quite believe it. It did not really make sense.

It was not tangible. You couldn't touch it. She couldn't feel her old, sticking socks; she couldn't be bothered by the dried mud on her jeans. There was dampness in her sweater sleeves Lily couldn't get out; she kept pulling stray strands of her hair off her face, out of her mouth. There was whistling inside one of her lungs. A thing pulsed sharply, fragilely, around her ribcage when they filled up with air, like a hairline fracture or a thorn under the skin. She didn't really notice it anymore.

Lily scrubbed her mouth with a palm heel. Forty hours since she'd eaten last, and the insides of her didn't didn't turn over like they usually do, seeking, looking into themselves. They hurt. Brief, stabbing contractions through an urgent and unvarying simmer. The tender interior of her nostrils cracked. Her eyeballs stung. Her tongue tasted wet and sour. She dug one elbow into her gut in an effort to disperse the go-away ache.

Lily was standing in the grim light outside that freaky little goth joint's backdoor, throat parched, trying not to shiver. She watched pedestrians meandering the patio. She watched a guy bend over and throw up. She watched for anything. She waited.

There was a thrumming from inside _The Asylum_. It was a little like trance and it was a little like laughter, though that didn't make any sense; she shouldn't be able to hear that; you can't hear laughing through brick walls. It was getting hard to hear much of anything with certitude over the stuff sloshing around inside her head. This noise, internal and constant, made Lily think of pinballs. Pinballs for eyes playing around in her brain. No, not that—this was less metallic, more basal, not as flashy, lots more starch. Snare drums, maybe. Drumsticks rattling against the bones of her skull. She had seen that on the _The Flinstones_ or something. She wondered if this is how a junkie feels. She wished she had been more generous to the poor.

Something burbled just beneath the protrusion of her ribs. Lily badly needed to eat, but the exhaustion had bogged her miscreated little body down, making small parts jitter and large ones drag. It got worse by the hour and made the cotton-candy lights in that club wink, swell, swirl, change like a carnival house. Maybe if she could lie down and sleep for a while.

Lily was afraid to go to Knox's apartment, and that baby-blue studio with the jellyfish on the sheets and the cat clock on the wall felt like it belonged to a different person now. She had been burrowing in a rotted-out train car behind _Brothers' Salvage_ for two nights. It was hard to rest in there. Sleep, when she caught it, was rough, scanty, and her eyelids, like static, kept peppering awake. There was a dingy length of pale peach Sherwin-Williams carpet to ball up beneath during the daytime. She did not feel safe in a castle made of tin. She had the .45, though, and kept it next to her, thinking the solidity of gunmetal might keep her sane.

But that car and morning were a long way off now. It is better not to think in day-night cycles. It is smarter not to focus so far ahead of where your feet are falling on the ground.

A man was walking down her alley.

 _Here we go_ , Lily thought. Saliva pooled immediately. She folded both arms around herself, squeezed her hands beneath her pits, and practiced breathing in-out-in.

He was drunk. Stupid-drunk, and he stumbled behind a dumpster to relieve himself, trying to find the bead of zipper, bangs sweated to his face. There was a prickling like hackles along her dorsal. She felt like an escaped zoo creature. He smelled like a 7-11 and like oniony meat. She felt like her front teeth were trying to scratch through her gums.

Not wanting to wait any longer, unable to think-it-through, Lily pushed herself away from the bricks and was shuffling steadily up behind him when something stopped her—distant, unavoidable, like a tree over the road.

She saw Nines Rodriguez.

He was leaving the shipping depot across the street, moving at a brisk lope down the sidewalk, nothing recognizable on his face. There was nothing—and this is what stopped Lily, really, what slammed on her brakes and ran her blood cold—nothing on his face, at all. The Anarch was tense and inhospitable. He walked quickly down Fifth with that unfriendly, thousand-yard expression; a latent aggression; an absence of humanness, like dog eyes; sharp pupils, dark pelt; not the easy-going big-brother-mine she had known to be him, but it was unmistakably Baron LA.

She thought about bolting. For a second, she thought about going out there and trying to get his attention. She thought, unseriously, about shouting HEY, ASSHOLE, REMEMBER ME? But before Lily could do anything, he had stalked to the intersection, glanced both ways, and then he'd lunged through it, and that part of history was too far away from her, reabsorbed into the other people down the block. He had not noticed her.

And the child pressed back into her wall, breathing out, relieved not to have been seen.

Her leg bones burnt. Her eyelids crinkled uncomfortably. She tried to swallow, but the air caught in knots down Lily's throat. There wasn't any use wondering what in the hell the Anarch spokesman had been doing in Santa Monica; she'd seen him for all of fifteen seconds, not even long enough to do anything about it.

By the time it occurred to Lily to mind her dinner, the drunk had wrestled his pants back up, and was already staggering into a cab.

 _Fuck_ , she said, whimpering, mad at him, mad at Nines Rodriguez, mad at herself, suddenly unable to stomach any of this, and she hurried out of the alleyway before the bricks closed around her or anyone else came down.

Before Lily could process where she was going or what she was going to do there, it was the rude bare light of _Surfside Diner_ washing down her collarbone and showing all the dirt on this sad sweater-shirt. It was stagnant in these desperate hours of morning. Crunchy black wasp carcasses lined the windowsills, leftover from midday sun; a moth was plinking dumbly into lamp shades. Smelled like borax soap and bad lunchmeat sandwiches. There was a spot of blood on the belly that looked like oil stain. Her leg hairs stood up but they were too fine for anybody else to really tell. For a few seconds, she just let herself be; the tacky red upholstery squinted back, and this checkerboard tile felt sobering, but there was nothing Lily needed to sober-up from.

The wilting matron did not look up. She tipped away at her front register, gray curls and fabrics, a floral sheath and shoe polish sight you could not see without thinking of funerals. Did this woman say something to her? _Find yourself a place, honey,_ it might have been. _I'm sorry?_ Lily thought she said-back, but nobody answered, and then Lily wasn't sure those weak words had really made it out. She found herself a place at the counter. She sat.

There was a group of tittering female boarders downing decaf in a booth. Lily picked her spot both because she wanted to watch them and because she felt dangerous getting too close. When one, a chlorine-green blonde, glanced up, it brought something real jarring back, and the thin-blood gulped, blinking hard, remembering not to zone-out, and to never-ever stare. _I'm not going to hurt you!_ she wanted to say. It was a bizarre, out-of-body urge. She wanted to blurt. _Hey, I'm dying over here, really, but I'm not going to come after you. I was what you are. You are what I was and I wouldn't do that. I wouldn't do this to you._

But oh my god, that was crazy; she couldn't do that; it was nuts. Her feet found some purchase on the cold metal stem of the stool. She leaned forward. She put her head down for a second and rested her eyes.

" _You OK there, honey?"_ the woman at the register asked. Lily sat upright and said yeah. _Yeah, sorry. I'm just tired._

The solitary waiter on-duty tonight, a wisp of man who just had to be a student actor—too handsome, too young, too resilient to be anything else—forced his best cheerful smile and asked for her order. He thought she was a druggie; Lily could tell. She heard herself request water and a BLT. He brought her overcooked bacon and refrigerated lettuce on stale wheat. _Thanks_ , she said. He said _Just shout if you need anything, sweetie_. He did not expect she was going to tip. She could tell.

Lily shoved crust crumbs around the plate edges, dabbing at beads of condensation that gathered along the clean porcelain. Disarmingly clean; shockingly clean. She tucked five crumpled dollars beneath it. She looked to the group of women, still laughing loudly over there in their bunker, so many blunt teeth shining under retro lamps. She stared through milkshake stains and straight to the floor. It seemed miles away.

Something that felt like her heart was pounding in Lily's throat. _How can I be here?_

Los Angeles; college-town; big-time; shitty diner, nasty bread; I am going to be so tan; you're not even going to recognize me, Mom; his name is Rolf and he is from Germany; sunscreen exploded at the bottom of a bag. 'Pretty nice,' I was trying to say. Busted flip-flop and pencil nubs. Hi, you probably don't remember me, but we met downtown a few nights ago and. There was a fold of twenty dollar bills in her pocket and they took everything she had. Relax, child; you're a baby. OK, Ms. Woeburne, I'll see you Wednesday. Vanilla cake and _Introduction to Ethics_ and veggie burgers on the quad. I don't even know how to drive. She toe-kicked a beachball right into that cute guy's face. You have a Natural Beauty. She had never seen anyone so beautiful in her whole entire life. My name is Lily, Lily Harris. I'm really bad at this; can I buy you a drink?

It was like kicking moon rocks. It was like being a piece of dust big planets boot out of their way.

A brunette slopped lukewarm latte onto a redhead. The victim squawked, pawed at her doused swim trunks, and retaliated with sugar packets all over the other one's head.

All of them dead—they are all dead—they are dead—dead—dead.

Lily finally got the swallow down.

There was a man sitting four stools over, hunched forward on his leather arm bands, skeletal face, thin-lipped, sad-eyed. He was looking at her. He had been tossing narrow _are-you_ glimpses in the Caitiff's direction since she'd entered, but now, noticing—feeling the wondering of the pupils, seeing hers in the whites of his—Lily could not take it. She could not take it. They're dead; they died; do you fucking understand me? Knox, Knox Harrington, glad to meet you, Lily Harris. They—all—died and she was suddenly terrified he might speak to her. The man stared for a full minute until the woman couldn't take it anymore and slipped off her seat, left knee twitching, cheeks yellow, falling into and finally through Surfside's cute red cherry door.

She breathed in. She sucked down the chilly black air until it filled her belly, stretching it, testing its perimeter, until it felt almost like something that could nourish you, because Lily could still do that, at least. She could still breathe. It stayed there as long as she could make it. Exhaling hurt. Everything else was beginning to hurt, too. Maybe she should have followed Nines. He didn't give a shit; she knew that now, obviously; she's not fucking stupid; but he was older than her, wasn't he. He was an older monster than she was and that gives you some goddamn responsibility shouldn't it. Maybe he would lend her a little help. A little help, that's it, that's all. Could she approach him? Would he even remember her—because, she tapped herself on the shoulder and coughed, he was probably on to a new baby child by now. Could he give her a break? Could she even walk up to this man and say his name?

No, Lily couldn't do it. Not that it mattered—he, and the off-chance, were long-long-gone.

Standing on the pavement, she looked at her watch. It said THREE FOURTEEN.

3:14, and this number is the most unreal thing that happened tonight. Two hours had passed somehow in the dismal curl of a restaurant behind her. It felt like twenty minutes. Lily considered hiking up her shirt, hustling into _The Asylum_ , ignoring the thin-blood ban, and soliciting there as fast as she could. She'd never fed in public, but it had to happen, right? Had to happen all the time. This had-to filled her with a premature burst of optimism. It was just once. It was only one time; what are the chances. What are the chances I will get—

Damsel.

Lily didn't stop. She could not. It was out of her control, this reaction—this body, this heart-skip, this scrambling, this smile. The Den Mother was standing on the busy curb, zaftig frame dwarfed by an overstuffed knapsack, scarlet stuffed under a black hood, loose strands radiating around her round and anxious face. The expression on it was definitely her, too—as much as it ought to be, just as Lily remembered it—reliably, recognizably ill-at-ease. She was here, and this was happening, and that wild maybe-chance doubled-back with trumpets and fanfare, whipping its horses down the row.

Because Damsel was focused on the alley behind her—on the traffic as it turned out of the overpass and into the parking garage—she did not see Lily. That vermillion mouth was grimacing, uncertain in new territory, fingers fisting around her bag straps, weight shifting between tiny sneakered feet. She was waiting on someone. Or something. No way to tell which. Outside of her safe house, the Den Mother looked less like a brick wall, less like a person who would show you a pistol then show you the door. But it was—more than Nines Rodriguez had been, anyway—still her.

Good sense slipped right through Lily's fingers and plopped on the sidewalk. She left it lying, discarded, and went over there, grinning blearily, as if there was nothing else a child could do.

And she must've looked like shit—filthy sweater, stutter-step, fingers twitching, wind-raw eyes and an open-mouthed smile. It was like that by-surprise instant of forgetting your name for a second. Damsel had the gall to squint as though she didn't recognize her. Lily didn't know what to do.

Finally: _Lily?_ the Brujah asked, nose crinkling, grimacing lopsidedly as though she'd just choked a cup of cough syrup down.

Lily was happy enough to burst. She dropped her jaw, but nothing came out—just a bemused, meaningless _yeah!_ —and the anticipation of waiting for Damsel to speak again.

"What the hell," she asked, pausing, astonishment neutralizing her permanent frown, an expression that said the Den Mother had clearly not expected to run into Lily ever again. "You. What are you doing? What are you doing hunting out here?"

It had frightened her momentarily, this paralysis—to be so excited but not to be able to speak. The words fell out like a dumped-over toy box. "I don't know. I really don't know. I'm not doing anything here. I just, you know. Ended up. You know? God. I'm so glad to see you. I can't even say it. This place, I mean. It's fucked. It's been crazy. It's just so good to see you. How—?"

She'd been about to ask _how are you_ , but there was a quiet knock of realization to Lily's gut, the thunking of her tired brain remembering old social cues. Damsel was not reciprocating. She stared, eyebrows forcing themselves back after that moment of shock, bunkering down until the Den Mother's soft look approached, through concentrated effort, a scowl. Bangs itched that fake color red at her forehead and were raked away. She was not making eye contact. She was looking for an exit, a way to reverse.

But Lily kept talking because she didn't know what else to do. She didn't have a real idea of how loud her voice became, that she buzzed with it like horseflies in a bottle, unable to keep still. A couple people walking down the sidewalk glanced their way and hurried up. It probably looked like a drug deal. Lily couldn't put one-and-two together to see she was blowing Damsel's cover, and bringing something low-down out onto the young Brujah's face.

"Things've been hard. LA was really," Lily spluttered, not knowing how else to put it, muddling through, "hard. I really, um. I really miss you. It's been a while. I miss seeing everyone. Haven't been over there in a while. But you know how it is. Out on your own. Takes some getting used to. It's just better when you have, you know. People. Hey! I saw—" But the ex-Anarch child thought twice about blurting that she'd just witnessed Nines Rodriguez prowling down a street that was not his own. "Uh. How's everybody?" she tried instead. "I was hoping maybe I could—just since it's been so long, right?—come by sometime. For a minute or two. Say hi."

Damsel hadn't said much of anything. She stiffened at that last syllable, two little letters, throwing another glance down the dark lane. Part of it was anxiety, sure; you don't get to be Den Mother without exercising an awareness of your surroundings, what's going on around you. But another part of that—the one that made her dodge Lily's eyes, shuffle both feet, look at everything, anything else?—came out more like shame.

"Look," Damsel told her—curt, wincing, some thickness rising in the depths of her throat. The Brujah did not look up. "It's not a good time."

"OK, well, that's fine," Lily figured, shrugging. Who did she sound like? _You know what I mean?_ What was her angle, her fixation, her tic? "When is a good time? I don't have, you know, a lot to do. I can come whenever."

"I don't know. Listen, I'm busy. This is gonna have to wait."

"Do you need help? Can I do something? Is there something maybe I can—?"

That did it. That was too much.

Damsel's uncomfortable, faltering _no_ turned into a snarl. She was angry. She was. Kick your dog; kick your kid; still it's _where should I sit, ma? What can I do?_ She did not want to do this now. She did not want to do this to anyone, ever, anymore.

"Look," the Den Mother gritted, exhaling slowly, trying not to be cruel, wanting more than anything for this sad shaking shadow to get the fuck out of her face and leave her in peace for a while. "You're not getting it, kid. This isn't your business. You don't have any business with us, OK? So just—go, all right? Get out of here. Go find something else to do."

It should have hurt Lily. It should have, maybe, even knowing what The Last Round was, but it didn't. She was too far out of her old self and that hurtable skin. There was just a forepain of blister—something that, in the future, might sting, but not yet. Not right now. Right now, all she remembered how to do was blink it away and stare and wait and see what would happen to her.

It didn't satisfy Damsel, who picked her palms up and pushed Lily's shoulders, making the neonate stumble backwards. "Are you deaf?" she spat, voice rising. The Brujah showed teeth. "I said fuck off. Fuck off, Lily! Get out of here. Damn it. Fucking fledglings."

Then she shoved her again—once more, to the chest—mean desperation, get-gone encouragement—go on, run—and Lily watched Damsel cram both hands into her pockets, disengaging, head-down walking away.

Lily was lost. She was lost and there was nowhere she could think of to go so she followed Damsel onto a square of sidewalk lagging behind those strong stocky shoulders hiked-up to the pint-sized Anarch's eyes which were bright eyes glowering that glower that always seemed to reach past the thinnest layer of her. She didn't slow down when the child called out but walked faster. Lily followed. She followed and their pace increased with her legs trying to keep up with Damsel's short ones, almost to a canter now, with her saying _wait Damsel wait_ and Damsel not saying anything, walking faster, hitting the corner, towards the traffic, out on the light of the street—

Then she stopped.

The Den Mother skidded to a halt mid-step. She was on the corner of Fifth and the gulch of beach parking, tight-lipped, eyes locked up the road.

"Shit," Damsel spat, and, backpack whipping around, tore past Lily, sprinting back down the murky lane where they'd met and unmet again. The child watched her lava-red head bob behind a corner of Megahertz Tech and disappear.

Reeling, Lily pressed her legs together, exhaled, and took another few steps forward, counting seconds until she reached the yellow glow of streetlights. The air out here was cooler, open. It smelled like beer and dancing. When she turned to face that alleyway again, trying to reorient, movement rushed behind her. Someone beeped. She could not see the faces in the windows of the cars.

She swallowed and breathed in and breathed in and breathed in until there was no more room inside her anymore.

Then something that felt like wire was around Lily's neck.

It pulled her into burlap darkness.

She never saw the van.

She was gone.


	85. Civil Procedure

The politicians of Los Angeles are a worrisome bunch.

" _Malingering mollycoddles,"_ if you want to use a phrase from Sebastian's book—though, to be honest, you probably shouldn't.

For her own part, LA's new officer said little about its vampire parliament. She would listen, catalog, forebear. She would sit straight in conference rooms, used to the mahogany on marble; she would watch secretaries recording minutes, crossing her legs in smoking lounges lined with brown leather and black carpet. Most importantly, Ms. Woeburne observed. The Seneschal collected. Every taut look, every miniature alliance, every charged pause that said more than the aggrieved parties did—all material a good diplomat learns to mine. She was not a particularly good diplomat—not yet, and perhaps not ever **—** but the Ventrue recognized valuable information, at least. She scavenged for it. She made really extensive notes.

" _I suppose it would be unreasonable of me to expect an ounce of ambition from my peers. Unfortunately, Ms. Woeburne,"_ as the Prince would sigh, tapping his pen, leveling a blunt, irritated look at his junior the moment they all left the room. _"We have little choice in dealing with them. Soothing fearful nobility has been the burden of leaders since long before either you or I were born. They are what they are, I'm afraid. And so must we be what we are."_

It had always been obvious (to her, at least, and probably to everyone else who spent any time around him) that Mr. LaCroix disdained the Primogen, in theory and in practice. He resented pandering to self-protecting lobbyists. What else does a man who prides himself on dispassion and modernity hate? Decorum, antiquity, fusty honor when it intrudes upon logic and anything that prevents him from moving, always, forward. He loathed Therese Voerman's increasingly heavy-handed petitions from Santa Monica; he despised Nosferatu babble roundabout Hollywood; and, most recently, Sebastian had learned a distaste for Mira's sycophantic gropings for cabinet recognition and a full office just below him. They piled on one another for attention. Inconveniences like bees: trifles, grudges, inconsistencies, financial loops, old dues, new requests, the stuff of nail-biting power-players with bones to pick and precious little patience. It was a cascade that could not be dammed. They were dogfish snapping bites. One Prince, even one as acquisitive and dictatorial as Sebastian LaCroix, could not expect to satisfy them all.

But, of course, this is why Princes have Seneschals.

Tonight, towards the tail end of November, S.W. was not placating her Prince but wrestling with a hall full of complaints he could not be bothered with. She stood in Conference Room Six with a very neat suit and her dusky hair rigid against the collar of a perfectly pressed shirt. Gray lapels beneath white light; vacant nods; clear eyes; cut fingernails. Shoulder pads, pen-to-paper, her back to the door. This is Seneschal Woeburne, your friendly neighborhood officer, ineffective but approachable, toothless, a dead end to smile while taking your call.

The well-dressed buzzards around her bled into uniform drone. She drove them in circles, as the Prince groomed her to do; when Ms. Woeburne shows up to your meeting, and does so alone, you know nothing important is going to be resolved. And oh, they knew it. The people seated before Seneschal LA were made of shoe polish, mousse, dry cleaning, bad manners. They were disgruntled lords and ladies swarming a small space—blanched carpet, crimson desk chairs, and this threatening black table, the centerpiece of a spotless, vacuum-sealed chamber that smelled like plastic and a little bit like the spray on her hair.

It was the same room she'd slumped in that first night in LA, as a matter-of-fact. Ms. Woeburne noticed this bit of trivia halfway through her faux-seminar, and because it was nothing to smile about, she frowned.

"I believe you had something to say in that regard, Ms. Greene," the Seneschal sliced in, just to prove she'd been listening, and to explain this unhappy look on her face. "You've been waiting patiently. Go ahead."

As if anyone needed her approval to speak. Ms. Woeburne always felt a little awkward at these gatherings. The realization of her small size flared. It soaked up everyone else's tension—in the mouth and through the brain, down the spine and in the gums, pinching her shoulders and twisting up nerves like a pull-string doll. Funny comparison, because her predictable responses might as well have been recorded from some other night. No one takes a dog of Sebastian LaCroix seriously. She's his houseplant, his left hand, his imported congressional aide. And Primogen expect their magistrates to elect weak loyalists, of course, but that said, they still don't appreciate these yes-men in their courtrooms. They find her youth and presence mildly offensive. They generally pay her as little mind as is required.

Which is very, very, very little. She'd like to underline that. She'd just like to stress that point.

The Gangrel at their table's head was tonight's most senior attendee. She settled forward and sighed in that no-cares blasé way of hers. Frank black eyes with carnivore pupils squared the room. When Rozalin did so, that mass of thick, suffocating gold hair, never pinned or twisted, fell forward around both shoulders. She was short and sturdy and did not otherwise dress herself up. "If you're not going to cull Caitiff, fine. I'm not opposed to a live-and-let-live. But realize that someone else will," said the most cynical voice in the room. It was a lovely voice, though. Rich and Renaissance and contralto. She wore a button-down blue shirt made of crushed velvet; it wrinkled; she sounded tired, like that pitch would never break a height again. "But. Because vigilantism is out-of-date these days—with your people, at least—I say it's something central administration should handle. Should have handled, anyway. There's too much coordination otherwise; whatever you do, it's got to be consistent. If it's not, we all might as well end up like Santa Monica, over there... bloody beachfronts and mad about it."

Here comes the bickering. Ms. Woeburne's lip began to curl. Most of the time, she was content to stand back and let them snipe at each other, a little family of hateful relatives who'd leave this reunion fuming deliciously, their stomachs full. Then each would stomp back to his or her corner of city and let everyone else be for a time. A short time. Well, next week, at least.

Therese flashed an irritated look three seats left, glasses resting on the part of her spun yellow hair. She sat primly, properly, malicious angles all tucked-in. The former Baron's self-assurance was a construct, obviously, and those coat sleeves were a little too dark to look healthy. But the signature, specially Voerman brutality of her coolness drew that anger inwards, at least against louder voices than hers. (Not so for Ms. Woeburne. At Ms. Woeburne, she screamed. They were similar in age and that is enough of a reason for young Ventrue to wish one another harm.)

"You aren't blaming me for the actions of madmen and mongrels, Rozalin," Therese said, surely, and that meandering, sinister voice was just nasal enough to scare.

"Blaming you? No," was all Greene said. Voerman peered narrowly at her until the strange feeling passed.

S.W. waited for a moment in which no-one-was-looking-this-way to rub at her temples and cringe.

"I actually have a concern." It was Ms. Giovanni who interrupted their sulking contest (and Ms. Woeburne's headache), one finger tentatively raised. _Actually_. That fluff word is the brand of insecure speakers and immature councilors; it was Mira's cornerstone. Actually, actually, _actually_. S.W. massaged harder.

"Go on," the Seneschal said. At least this one waited on her to barge in.

"If the Sabbat are behind the crime flux in Santa Monica—and I think we've pretty well decided 'yes' on that—maybe we should be talking about proactively pooling our resources. What we need is a defense fund. Granted, things are a little remote where I am. The Giovanni Estate is impenetrable; thieves I'm not concerned about. But my family—"

"Is also impenetrable, I'm sure." Ms. Voerman's painted eyebrow forked impossibly, insultingly high. They were the most expressive features she had.

"Oh, aren't they, indeed?" laughed Claudia Fairholm, liking the merciless joke a little too much, as she made it a point to do. The Toreador enjoyed the cruelty of being glamorous with no effort. She glistened like a sepia photo brought to life in a big, shouldery cat, fashionable without froofing, lashy fawn eyes, a garnish of vitality left. Houndstooth cut geometrics around her delicate gestures and her delicate bare, brown ankles. One red ribbon on a wrist and a clutch in one hand. You never saw her without gloves. She wore a black cloche over long black hair. "Los Angeles in bed with the Italians. Now there's a headline for the next company newsletter. I can only imagine what New York is saying about us now."

Rozalin sniggered beside Claudia under her breath. Her plainclothes, free-hair selfness was an intense contrast with Primogen Fairholm, who was both her closest ally and her closest friend. (And they both thought of talking to Isaac Abrams as stooping—so, for this, Ms. Woeburne admitted a little affection for them, regardless of how they felt about her.)

The Giovanni, crunched in a corner even less glorious than Ms. Woeburne's, bristled as much as she dared. Her rosewood cut was deliberately tousled but now looked messier than it ever had chic. Those hoops were like bell weights as they clinked at either side of a pretty throat. Short hair, short dress, short legs clambering up a tall ladder. She had made a big jump and had a long way to go. "Actually, we're more than willing to help. Where security is concerned," Mira pressed, ignoring the taunt. Strong fingers swept through the dark curlets at the back of her neck. "I may be a newcomer. But I'm part of this community, and I intend to make that clear."

"I'm not suggesting you haven't been a part of this community. I don't make a habit of 'suggesting,' Mira," Therese noted briskly. Briskly for her, anyway, which meant she got a little chilly around the consonants, and flicked that eyebrow higher still. "I merely think we could stand to revisit that event, and the—how did you put it—'progressive agenda' you bring to our table."

The Giovanni paled beneath her fake shimmer and faker smile. "That's not how I meant it. When I said what I said. Sorry if I seemed pretentious, but I stand by my words. Our family has been a key importer in Los Angeles for generations, has shaped its businesses and its social circles. I'm not laying down an empty check. Those connections? This momentum? They're going to bring changes. And I'm going to make sure those changes happen the way they're supposed to." It was a futile effort, trying to talk incredulous Elders to one's side. They were already committed to their personal dislike of Ms. Mira. Even those with the most meager seniority, S.W. included, had mentioned how uninterested they were in this petite senator's burgeoning ideas.

Ms. Woeburne, frankly, was glad to have someone younger around—someone whose titles were more audacious than her own. Mira made a vicious and short-lived accomplice during the downfall of Bruno Giovanni. She made an even better piñata to distract the spitting locals from kicking their new Seneschal in the shins.

"Oh, is that so?" Therese wanted to know. Her slow blink was serpentine and utterly evil. She settled both elbows across the faultless tabletop, a casual pose, aggression screaming out of every stitch. "Well, I'd never stand in the way of progress, Mira. Clearly I misunderstood. Why not take this opportunity to tell us more about your _changes_? I, for one, would love to hear them."

"This should be good," Greene agreed. Three vindictive Primogen were now staring eagerly at the lone Giovanni—three degrees of hostility, three sets of teeth in three jaws.

Mira tried to stay bright-faced. Had they been better friends (or friends at all), Ms. Woeburne might've told her to drop it already. Bushy-tailed optimism in a Domain with porous borderlines is as self-destructive as sticking your hand on a barbeque grill and calling it a day. This is Los Angeles. You are a snake by association to shake hands with Sebastian LaCroix. Take it from someone who knows. Besides, everyone had seen what became of her predecessor that immaculate midsummer night.

"I'm not claiming to see the future," Mira tried, fingers drumming their table, nails tempting its very edge. She scooted a bit. She wore a big pink flower on her oversized belt. "But this partnership makes me hopeful. That's all I really meant."

Honestly—if you smashed in her face, would small candies and colors come bursting out?

Ms. Woeburne cleared her throat. She was currently fixed by the shit door, upright with heels touching, far enough away from the ceiling fan to avoid looking windswept but close enough to feel a draft. Mr. LaCroix had told her a Seneschal always ought to stand at these meetings. Him (and her?) being militarily-reared, after all. And, more than that, they were both painfully aware of the risks in sitting next to grumbling discontenters, in giving them that clean shot at your sides. She felt authoritative this way. She felt relatively safe being ignored.

On the other hand, she also felt like a butler, so take your jackboot pick.

"Peers," the Seneschal chimed in, existing when needed, an usher of a diplomat. She'd taken to referring to them all in this mundane, meaningless way. "If we could just reel ourselves back in. Ms. Voerman's earlier statements about Caitiff were well-put. If you have anything more to add."

"Thank you, Ms. Woeburne." (Therese presumed first-name familiarity more than she ought to, yes, but only from those the malicious legatess actually desired familiarity with.) "But no. I've articulated my concerns. Exhausted them, you could say."

That was a barb. It was easy to see how neglected Santa Monica's head-honcho thought said concerns were.

S.W. diverted. She didn't particularly want to be blasted over the telephone again. "They've been heard. The Prince is designing an appropriate response, both to the short-term problem of violence in your district and the continuing problem of illegal Embrace. He'll consult you. You'll be kept in the loop."

Therese's penciled-in brows lifted, tweaked.

Ms. Woeburne would make sure the Baron understood how she'd covered for his poor judgment. Again.

Well, or she'd blackmail him with it someday. Not this one, though. Plied correctly, a little poor Anarch judgment isn't strictly a bad thing.

They aren't getting the jump on her again, anyway. Not this one. Not this time.

She used a hand to quiet the buzz in her coat pocket. She ahem-hemmed.

"You understand I was hoping to speak to the Prince," Voerman informed her, for the umpteenth time, as she did during every single summit Ms. Woeburne ever hosted. It was said with a clear intonation of this being the Seneschal's fault.

And, for the umpteenth time, Ms. Woeburne replied: "Mr. LaCroix is meeting with Regent Strauss about security protocol as we speak. Else—I need not remind you—he would be here right now."

Their disrespect was liberating, in a way. With no ground to lose, one could afford the occasional slip-up or bellyache. No one important bothered getting very mad at a mouthpiece Seneschal. So S.W. let herself get a pinch passive-aggressive here-and-there. (Hell, she could probably bounce in wearing pink footies and a baby bib, sucking her thumb and pulling at pigtails; this is largely how LA imagined Prince LaCroix's yip-yapping little overseer, anyway.)

Distracted by the bickering, one might miss Alistair Grout entirely. He was scowling mistily, unparticularly, in a far chair, his red mane barely brushed and milky sockets lost beneath wild brows. This is usually how these nights go for him. Other councilors hemmed and hawed at one another while the Malkavian fussed with the vest buttons on his absurdly formal three-piece. Sometimes this misplacement annoyed Ms. Woeburne; other times, she welcomed a body that would give her no trouble. It was hard to determine whether or not the man had a similar opinion about Seneschal LA. Sometimes he would afford her an archaic little bow when they happened to meet eyes in Nocturne, a courtesy she, albeit feeling silly about it, returned. Others, he would visibly startle at her hellos as though S.W. were a complete stranger. It was clearly not the worst thing anyone had ever done after Ms. Woeburne walked into a room.

Tonight, Grout alternated between picking at the loose chocolate-and-gold of his embroidery to staring, vaporously, through an unshuttered window. He was tortoise-like: easy to alarm, slow but reliable, eyes larger than they should have been. It was odd to hear him, suddenly.

"It seems we have no fewer bolts in our machine," the Malkavian suggested—trying to be helpful, she supposed, to smooth this unproductive snapping down. She confessed to feeling a little fondness for him on account of it. His voice was old, dramatic, trembling from his iron belly, wobbling beneath the verbosity with which he processed the world. You wondered if he had always spoken like this. Alistair's was a strange spiral of very smart mind. "I wonder what shadow is hanging over them both. It must be a nebulous phantasm, indeed, to keep two devils away while law cries to be made. Unseemly to keep us waiting in uncertain times."

What sort of sign is it, S.W. wondered, when the madman makes the most sense in the room?

"It _is_ , Alistair," Fairholm pouted. She was playing with her ribbon, rolling scarlet between thumb and forefinger. The tiny gesture was as intimidating as a spurned Baron cleaning his nails with a knife.

"And for that, you have my condolences." The Seneschal's comment sharpened every eye in their tiny moot.

Oh, tough, Ms. Woeburne thought. Which was as close to blurting "too damned bad" as she'd ever get.

Honestly, Strauss would've been a handy buffer to have here instead of murmuring upstairs with Prince LaCroix, tapping their fingers together, cooking up their plotty little plots. The Regent's perpetual, erudite calm had a smothering affect on a forum. And it was not missed by Ms. Woeburne that whenever Maximillian attended these midnight meetings, so, too, did her Sire. (She was glad for it. Tremere's Primogen had always behaved civilly; the lucid depths of his speech were emotionally, physically reassuring in a very familial way. But there was also a darkness, an eldritch clout, swirling behind those scholar's spectacles and the grandfather clock tranquility you could not forget. They are qualities that bid you to confide in him. Confidence, for a bureaucrat, is always a mistake. He studied you—and Ventrue who balance a thousand mistruths are highly uncomfortable with being studied.)

Grout scrubbed at the creases wilting on his forehead. They'd gone sallow, like old cabbage, a yellow pigment blinking beneath gray roots that turned quickly to bizarre orange wire. He took up his cup for a shaky drink of blood. "Shame Anthony isn't here."

"Oh, yes. 'On clan business' still. I'm sure I'll come running back to town when he hears about how delightful these proceedings have been." Voerman's tone went even frostier and her left eyebrow looked like it just clicked its heels. She had not put a single lip-print on the glass before her. "Though what business that is remains to be seen."

Brujah Primogen Anthony Hale remained an unmarked checkbox on Ms. Woeburne's to-do list. She knew his name and his reputation only through the snide gossip of other politicians, exactly how she also knew about the man's pompous, starchy disposition and virulent racism. But the councilor had departed Los Angeles shortly after Sebastian LaCroix arrived and declared him a Primogen. Every once in a while he'd fire a noncommittal letter their way, just to prove his continued existence and crow about how very preoccupied he was upstate.

 _Curious_ , snickered the bunch left behind in LA. The reason for his absence, officially, was "clan operations." But everyone suspected Hale's business was actually fear—or was it a sound awareness?—of how opportune an example his head might make sitting halfway down a pike on Nines Rodriguez's castle wall.

Ms. Woeburne didn't care one way or the other. Let Hale stay boarded up behind bad excuses rather than breathing down her neck.

Besides, it would've been just what she needed: a Brujah in a suit.

"He'll be _thrilled_ to make the Seneschal's acquaintance. Not to mention our newest associate's. Hello, Mira." Claudia shared a grin with the Giovanni that looked more like a slap. Arms clasped comfortably behind her back, the Seneschal gave an itty-bitty, entirely pleasant smile of her own. You'll have to dig deeper than that, witch.

Grout harrumphed into his handkerchief, tucking it back into one breast pocket, the same rag he always used. "Well, no matter. We are sure to palaver again once he is not stuck fast in Sacramento by the viscid nature of clan correspondence."

Greene did not hide her smirk. "Or by Barons that go bump in the night."

"Do we even have their cooperation in this? I've heard there were skirmishes to the south," Ms. Giovanni noted, an attempt to regain her composure. She'd crossed one leg over the other with a bulky boot bobbing, making a metronomic nervous pace that tried to appear laid-back. You had to give her credit for resilience, at least. "Better out there than up here, but it would be nice to know exactly who and what we're dealing with."

"I am working on that," Ms. Woeburne guaranteed, genuine enough. The Seneschal's shoulders were beginning to ache, gradually but naggingly, pinching along her upper back. She shifted the weight between her pumps, moving both frigid hands over her navel and clasping them there. "Keeping this community safe is Prince LaCroix's foremost concern and there are several plans in-motion to reinforce our borders."

The Gangrel gave her a yeah-yeah-yeah glance. Rozalin tapped the rim of her drink, not especially hostile, but hardly sympathetic to such a shark-faced officer with such a chisel chin. She looked feudal beside blood in fine goblets. "We don't doubt it, Ms. Woeburne. We only hope your administration is willing to actually divert the resources it has outlined for us."

The Seneschal forced out a smile that wrinkled her nose, sugary snide, unable to cloak the contempt. "None more so than I, Primogen Greene, I assure you."

Rozalin gave a limp sneer-and-shrug that might have been disregard and might have been approval. Woeburne guessed it fell carelessly somewhere in-between.

They went on like that for some time: accuse, rebuff; imply, ignore. They plucked and chuffed at one another, snapping in unfriendly figure-eights, dull parlay without progress. Another ninety minutes passed before the Kindred of Los Angeles tired of these lightweight politics and of each other. Then it was time for shuffled papers, goaded faces, conge and cabs home. (And, on Ms. Woeburne's behalf, many lines to scribble into a report). She kept pokerfaced and appropriately cordial as they stood up, filed out before her, and down to Venture Tower's main lobby. She saw to it Joelle had all their cars waiting in the parking lot. She stood in front of that great big front desk to wish five goodnights—mandatory farewells, civil procedure—friendliness frozen only long enough to hear doors slam and see headlights wink.

One responsibility down, Ms. Woeburne unhitched her brow, loosened her tie, mumbled _thanks_ to a sourly silent Lefevre and went clacking back through the building on gunshot heels.

Her shoulders didn't relax much as Seneschal LA moved up the marble staircase, blue light on the bleak stone paralyzing in its frostiness. But her steps were harder, firmer, more focused. She moved past the row of elevators, towards Venture Tower's rear exit. There was no give to Ms. Woeburne's gate. She was not likely to be stopped by anything right now, save perhaps gunfire or Sebastian LaCroix; the Ventrue was done turning circles tonight.

S.W. has always been a stiff personality, it's true—but occasionally, in this line of work, you have to make yourself be a little unpredictable.

"Mr. Leonard," she said into her cellular phone, voice crisp and perilous again. "I'm sorry I missed your call. I was detained. Yes, I received the images; thank you; very promising. I'm paging through them now. You're sure about the tamper-proofing? As glad as I am to hear that, you understand I can't just take your word on it. Is it possible for you to send me a—? Oh. Yes. That will do. That should do," she told him, "just fine."

" _Your position—as a Seneschal and in this cabinet—demands, above all else, a talent for prioritization,"_ Mr. LaCroix told her, a daub of advice on that very first new office meeting they had. The Prince came to Ms. Woeburne's fresh, clean, hardwood space on Floor 102 and let her stand behind her sanitary new mahogany desk while he spoke, but she would not dare sit down. _"You cannot thrive on one track alone. You have to perform. You are required to face, contain, relegate, and do all of this without letting our main projects hit the floor."_

"What you can trust, Mr. Leonard," the Seneschal said to the boy on the phone, "is my discretion, and the track record of this organization when it comes to rewarding those who provide it a service. Santa Monica is your service to us. If you're free, then yes. I will call you back in an hour with more instructions. Very good. We'll speak again shortly."

She hung up the telephone. A Prince was waiting for a report upstairs.

One more ball in the air.


	86. At the Top of the Hill

When Nines walked into Golden Age Jewelry that night, Isaac was already standing. In retrospect, that was probably not a good sign.

“OK. You called me here on awful late notice,” Baron Angeltown informed him, sliding into the autumn-lit ambiance of that fat cat office, opening the door just enough to step his body side-a-ways in. “Why aren’t we—?” But Baron Hollywood cut him immediately off.

“What in the hell were you thinking?” It wasn’t rightaway clear.

“Excuse me?”

Isaac was poised behind his goldwood desk, but not in the typical tossed-back show of Mafioso relaxation. The Toreador had both palms pressed flat across its surface, heavy watch propped ominously upon the bed of one knuckly backhand. The pose hiked the tips of those gray suit shoulders, making his silhouette on cranberry wallpaper batlike and theatrical. Rodriguez might’ve scoffed at the effort were there not an expression to match, right there, dark furrows enlivening his most powerful ally’s face. Low, cattail brows and a stiff forward chin. Those yellow eyes were stage let. He was not studying Nines. He had a portentous sort of Big Man look about him—an Othello of a look—committed to the grueling thunderstorm it was about to bring down.

“Don’t waltz in here and pull that fall guy James Dean coy crap on me,” Hollywood tsked, lip-curling enough to bare a tooth. And he’d talk to you just like that, Isaac—in that ridiculous, broad-shouldered swagger, should’ve been ridiculous. But somehow, from him, it wasn’t. The man’s-man lingo didn’t seem fake, didn’t smack of washed-up silver screen delusions. Maybe he was that good of an actor. Or maybe that Golden Age toughguy was really who Isaac Abrams—under the Oscar finish and among those movie star snapshots all over his hallways—had always been. “You want to shake your ass at a benefactor, go open a club. But you don’t have the cool or the clout to try and pull one over in my city. You know damn well what I’m talking about, and if you don’t realize why we’re not running numbers together this month, you’d better get to figuring it out—and fast.”

In that instant, the Baron did not think of a house with tiki print and head blood on the wall. In that instant, with every fiber of his body in agreement, he did not know.

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

Isaac’s an eagle perched on the scarecrow’s hat.  He sits on the precipice and he watches for the smaller birds to lose their cool and run.

“I know,” Baron Hollywood promised. “You’ve been taking money from Nicky Shih.”

Brains on a plain white shirt sleeve.

Cheap smoke in the air.

Nines stopped where he was in the middle of the chamber. He never felt deader than when that spike of adrenaline hit and he did not take in a breath.

“You want to do this _now_?” Baron LA tried, and heard his voice clearly through his teeth in the still parlor air. It seemed a little tighter, a little higher, than he made it out to be. Nines Rodriguez was beginning to feel an almost-forgotten kind of small.

“You think I ever want to have this kind of conversation, you have sorely misjudged me. Consider yourself lucky,” Isaac snapped, speaking quickly, the tense edge lending his voice an unusual bristling character. He sounded like a guy too important to have a gun in his pocket; in Hollywood, the gun is always carried by somebody else. “That you’re having it with me and not a gloomy room full of my men.”

“Hey. Hold on. If you’re going to let me talk—”

“You’ve talked way over your appointed time. But if you’re dead-set on yammering deeper into this, I guess I’m going to hear it.”

“All I said to Shih was that I’d consider partial backing. From damn near anybody. And that’s true. You know the situation I’m in isn’t looking to lighten up any time—”

“I know the ‘situation’ we’re all in doesn’t invite you to sign off on a side hustle with my employees— _former_ employees.” The Baron spoke quickly and sharply. “I know your idea of backing doesn’t include a thorough check on where the billfolds you’re being handed under the table come from. Because _if_ they did, I know you’d be barreling ass-over-ankles to let me know one of my people has been tapping into my Childe’s—”

“That is your business. That is you and him. You do not get to dictate who I do and don’t talk to. This was not in any way about our arrangement. It had nothing to do with—”

“If you think you can afford to lose Hollywood for some chump change and a backroom handshake, then please, by all means. Scheme on.”

A light on in a Santa Monica warehouse.

A message from a Ventrue on his machine.

It’s all shrinking now in Los Angeles. He had to have another place apart from Hollywood when the dogs came in running. He had to get himself somewhere else but Griffith Park to go.      

“If you know,” Isaac threatened—frank eyes, smart suit, a dot-dot-dot menacing the end of his words. “Where the hell Nicky slunk off to, it would be _very_ wise to open your mouth and sing.”

I don’t, Nines said.

Nines stood in the unmoving blank space of that warm red office and he said _I didn’t know he was gone_.

Isaac didn’t say anything. Isaac waited for the hunch he ought to bring his other shoe down.

“There are some times,” the Baron of Hollywood began—or continued—because this push-and-shove show between anarchies had gotten stale by now, and crumbled more at the edges every night. He stood loose-limbed, one hand in his pocket. Torrio, Giancana, Big Jim. These old Toreador are the movie mafia with the movie part way out on the side. “That I don’t think you hear me so well, kiddo. I think that ought to change.”

There are some times that all Nines has is his poker face and his big dreams revolucionario lack of a smile.

“Ah, now you want to listen to me talk—is that right? Little late in the grand old scheme to start thinking damage control, Baron.” He said the word with just enough breath tilted just the right way to make all its hollow corners shake, to point out how easy it would be for a good gust to blow the foundations down. “But since I’ve got your ear, let me make a suggestion. The next time you get the idea to deal behind my back, cash a dirty check, and scare one of our rats out of town—don’t. You’re as obvious as a crook on a lineup.”

“What are you suggesting, here? If you’re trying to accuse me of having something to do with this, you’re out of your goddamn mind. You are way cross the line. I have NEVER—”

“I didn’t accuse you, Rodriguez. I asked you. But it’s telling—if that nuance has ceased to mean anything to you since the mess your people made of that de Luca trial. You’re leaving your jobs half-done, and I’m here picking up the tab for terrorism.”

“That was not MY fucking ‘job,’ do you understand me? WE did not make that mess—but you can bet _I_ am left cleaning it up all by myself. So it would be real fucking helpful if you could pull your hands out from under your ass and start cutting us some actual funding out there. You back me in incrementals and promises. Fuck yes, I told Shih I was open to outside banking. What did you expect me to—?”

“I expect you not to risk what precious little steady support you have being stupid with a bucket of C4 and a Seneschal.”

“That was not me. I did not call that. We do not speak.”

“She’s one card on the stack, slick. You’ve been leaving messes everywhere you park your people since MacNeil dropped out.”

“You are WAY out of your—”

“And the real rub of it is: I don’t know how much you banked, and I don’t know how much he offered you. But I do know with great confidence that you just about sold your own ground out from under you for it. Hope it was worth the no-strings bonus,” Isaac sneered, as much of a sneer as a ritz and glitz cappo can make with a silent _tsk_ and a too-bad half-shake of his head. “I hope you’re happy with your real estate downtown, because if you expect to quarter troops in my city again after you muscled Shih up the river—listen to this: Tough, buddy.”

And Nines puts on a pretty good indignant act; he can drum up some real convincing, righteous confusion; but what Nines Rodriguez does and doesn’t seems to matter less and less these nights. To Hollywood; to everyone; to the past and future versions of himself, up late and up early planning contingencies, squirreling away weapons, picking up speed. In all of his doomsday scenarios, he’s running on gossamer strings, pulling each rung farther and farther apart by the step. He’s built up his web too fast, too thin.

“I am going to tell you right here—If you think you can swing some fucked-up—You have got this _beyond_ backwar—”

An eagle on a scarecrow has a baronial advantage: height plus claws. These days, if Nines was backed into a corner and angry about it, Isaac did not have to care. He said: “Them’s the breaks, kid.”

Too many things in the air this season. When he thinks about the new year, he can’t get that boom-sound out of his head.

“I don’t know where he is,” Nines promised, even though he always swears not to repeat himself. When you’re running this hot, and you can just start to see the end of the track opening up before you like a wound, you start feeling the very skin-deep repetitions of your body. Foot left, foot right. Breath in, breath out. Your hear trebles. It’s the muscle that won’t let you forget it says: _boomboomboom_.

Hollywood can fold up his act in a second. When it’s all been a big yes-or-maybe production, the plain-old NO is the most damning way a curtain can drop.

“Well. Then until we clear this up, you’ll understand me,” Isaac assumed, knowing there was nothing else Nines could do, and knowing—as you just had to know, these nights—that everybody’s minutehand is a few ticks off; the question isn’t “where” anymore; for the Free-State, it’s always going to come down to _who, when_. “When I tell you to pick up your show and move the hell out of my town.”

Losing Hollywood was never a matter of “if,” either.

Nines couldn’t put up much of a fight. He picked up his show and got out.


	87. The Raft of the Medusa

The first time the Sabbat try to attack him, Sebastian LaCroix is in South Africa, and he escapes by the skin of his teeth. Five men with an assortment of genocide machetes and long-snouted hunting rifles burst into the manor house one evening to splatter elephant slug all over his finely-papers walls.

The second time the Sabbat try to attack him, Sebastian LaCroix is in Villefranche, and he is more than prepared. A pirate's boat sidles up alongside his rock face villa and is riddled to driftwood before it can squeeze off a shot. Afterwards, he sees it oiled and lit afire, hull sinking beneath la Darse.

Tonight, in Los Angeles in December, they are a sad coterie of rabid dogs slinging pistols, scrambling up one-hundred floors with nothing but the wet, hungry threats in their mouths. There are no shotguns; there are no cannons or explosive rounds. There is not even a madman wearing a bomb. It's almost disappointing. If the Sabbat's compunction to assassinate you in any way measures a Camarilla gerent's success, Sebastian might guess he'd gone down in the world.

When the siege—and he described it generously—took place, Prince Los Angeles was sitting in his penthouse with Ms. Woeburne, and they were suddenly disturbed by a high-pitched chime.

"What was that noise?" she asked, straightening up in her chair, glancing to the door.

He said: "I wonder."

They'd been having a civil chat about the various subtexts of headship, Domination etiquette, and damage control—a rare moment of philosophizing for Sire and Childe, these nights—one he was sure she appreciated. The Seneschal wanted a lesson plan, not vague musings on _What It Means to be Ventrue_. He didn't blame her. Sebastian LaCroix understands the desire for something to be exact.

He had given up on finding this quality in a servant—exactness. Ms. Woeburne did her best, but she was too angular, too easily crunched like a paper house. Still, no harm in making her a little more useful. No harm in conditioning her for a task that is not saying _yes, I will_ , or being in the wrong place at the wrong time. There was a thirty-minute gap between the weekly interview with Beckett and Friday's budget report. He could squeeze her in there. So they met, and, for the first time in a very long while, he spoke to his Childe seriously again.

This class pet cheerfulness Ms. Woeburne shot his way was at least partially artificial, of course—but in light of how he had maneuvered her, and what she had summarily learned—the Prince respected his corporal a little bit more for trying so staunchly to fake it.

But the Seneschal had no idea their headquarters were under assault, and why would she? It sounded more like a bit of intercom trouble than a proper alarm. Her superior said nothing to correct the supposition, either. She blinked politely and waited for it to stop. Diligent thing; she'd be panicking if someone explained there had been a breach, but no one had. He didn't think it worth mentioning. What was the use in agitating her now? Her agitation annoyed him. An officer may as well sit there being ready to do whatever it was she was told.

He had three snipers in the library attic across the street and martial response already en route. And, obviously, there was the Sheriff.

Things rarely got so messy these days. Venture Tower hadn't been compromised since he'd first settled in; even then, their biggest troublemakers were overeager radicals, not organized spies. He wasn't highly concerned. The mass-messaging system eliminated the need to warn anyone important, so, as an afterthought only, the Prince plucked up his telephone and dialed downstairs.

"Ms. Lefevre," he said, composed and untroubled, lips barely pursed, leaning forward on the blackwood desk. Two fingernails tip-tapped on a thin stack of folders. She had not qualified for placement on the exclusive _Anyone Important_ list. "You might want to relocate. Immediately."

No sooner than he'd said it, there was a squeaky shatter, and a dull pop-pop-pop of gunshots over the phone.

Prince LaCroix hung up.

"I wouldn't worry about it," he told the Seneschal, and this meeting was still going on.

Ms. Woeburne's ears weren't sensitive enough to hear the lobby commotion, but they didn't miss the stiff _pow!_ of a door lock blasted from its moorings five stories down. She swiveled around in the chair, scooting to the edge of her seat, lids peeled back to bare the whites of two wide and unimpressive eyes.

"What in the hell was _that_ ," she asked again, louder this time. The Seneschal was already moving to her feet.

Prince Los Angeles sighed.

What a bother.

He was perturbed they had scurried so far up, truthfully, and made a mental note to punish the Sheriff for this. Someone had lapsed. Someone had clearly dropped the ball.

Blitzing the door while sending a climber up the exhaust pipes isn't an entirely dismal plan. Playground tactics, naturally—the most basic building blocks of strategy—but not altogether useless. It might have worked. Might have, were this building manned by idiot Barons rather than a Camarilla Prince. One dog crawling through ventilation shafts on its belly did Sebastian LaCroix the favor of pointing out a security flaw. That is it. That is all.

He could guess why they'd come. Provided these basal peoples needed a reason to throw themselves at the palace walls and tear down a flag or two—the Sabbat were here, most likely, for the Sarcophagus, something they'd a irritating interest in sniffing about for themselves. Loose the scent of beef in the air, and, naturally, here they are: barreling in, half-cocked, with neither hide-nor-hair of a plan for acquiring the thing. Sebastian could not let himself be surprised.

He could not draw comparisons with the Chantry house, either, though—on another day—he might've liked to try.

Sad, scraping beasts, chasing tribal visions from days of yore, skittering at shadows on the mouths of their caves. You do not fear an animal, even knowing its taste for meat. It is too simple for its evil to mean something. It is too urgent and its mind is too flat.

Sabbat are rhinoceri in a glass house. Everything they see explodes or is crunched into clay.

Still, Prince LaCroix does not take very kindly to them rolling about his estates.

He expected the Sheriff was making short work of the slipshod blitz downstairs. As such, Sebastian kept his patience long enough for that one set of reckless, intrusive footsteps to overtake the floorboards just beyond this heavy penthouse door. Then, irritated in earnest, he sighed, frowned, and pushed himself away from the pitiless black desk.

Ms. Woeburne watched him wait with confusion, and a rising, unfortunately obvious concern.

A good soldier can afford to be afraid. But a good commander does not show the hammering of his ambition or his heart.

And the white-gold doors kicked open to the mad boar drooling outside.

Seneschal Los Angeles skittered to her feet in an instant, tall and authoritative, standing in front of that obviously uncomfortable chair—eyes sharp like she might clap her hands and say _stop, you—_ and expect her enemies would. He, on the other hand, didn't move. The Sabbat bristled with quills-out, growling. Two grenades were clipped showily to the thing's sides, blades flashed behind its arms, and a pistol blinked stupidly on one meaty thigh. They let it snarl like something significant. But it's a transparent mantle, a delusional carrying-on. Nothing it had would allow it subsistence. It was wide-eyed and shivering and mad like it already knew this simplicity to be true.

You are not out of your mind to pity a cur, he supposes, but you are unwise. Sebastian has never wasted his attention or his time on pity. It is the most enfeebling of emotions. It will soften your skin and show the world there is a clear shot to your live heart.

"Made it all the way up here, have you?" Prince LaCroix asked, lips pursed, one gold eyebrow lifting up the otherwise implacable face.

The intruder's jaw wagged. It hissed uselessly. Its scalp was shaved, its fangs bare and dry in the air conditioned tower. And this is how he knew its bones felt—even if they did not yet know it—the finality in this Ventrue room.

Ms. Woeburne stared blankly at the Sabbat, who stared at the Prince, who beheld them both with an indolent air of displeasure.

All at once, it swatted the gun from its belt, pointing to fire in Ms. Woeburne's direction. She stood there swallowing over and over in her lady's suit because there was nothing else particularly effective to do.

 _Mm—no,_ thinks LaCroix. That is a waste of a resource. This is not the time to expend.

The villain might have dispatched his corporal. _Attaque au Fer_ , striking your opponent's weapon before you check their arm _—_ it is a legal move. The villain might have made a better feint than it did. The villain certainly possessed the courage and the speed, if not the personal acumen, or the cleverness such a march requires.

Except it made a rookie mistake—a devastating, neonate mistake—indicative of one who does not know Clan Ventrue.

It looked directly at Sebastian LaCroix's eyes.

When one attempts to advance, to enter your sphere and stamp your toes, you may choose to engage them in the traditional way. You might, if you have a lesson to teach, or an audience to impress, flourish the circular cut, the flash and the pomp of the showman's blade. There is still value in winning by toil and superior skill. But—if you are a man in a position of rank; if you are a master with nothing to prove—then you may elect to win by control. This is the qualifier beyond any other that determines how the fight will progress, where it will heighten, and when it will end. A competent duelist may trounce his opponent in the field; an impeccable duelist will own that field and every weapon on it well before final contact is made.

The Seneschal is quick enough to see this happen. Something deepens, blackens, and sinks, a churning from one pupil to the next, a _passé_ through the flesh of the eyeball, a riposte into the forebrain. When it hits, you will not see blood, but you'll know. That hideous spreading of teeth, savage and insecure, lingered where it had first overtaken the animal's face, but lost its meaning. It became hollow. The ligaments, malleable; the fats, shapeable. She could not explain it, his corporal—but she knew it, too. It is as though your ego and id have run out of fuel and stalled, elbow-locked, condensed into a single dimension. It is like looking out through the eyes of a doll. It is—though you may not understand it as such from that emptied, supine position—the nadir of submission, what is known as the death-trance, when you are encased by yourself as you have not been since emerging from the fluids of the womb.

"Stop. Where you are," Sebastian said, clearly, neither yelling nor whispering, but speaking—though the Sabbat already had. He rounded his desk. "Don't take another step. Place your pistol on the ground in front of you, place your hands behind your back, and kneel."

The Brujah's body began to pop in a series of twitches. His joints, trembling, fought—for that is what Brujah do when such a physical thing attempts to overcome them—resisting the traitorous cleaving of its muscle. Eventually, the last wicks of willpower burnt out. It lowered the handgun. It dropped the machete that had been dangling from its hand. Then, amidst the clanging of steel, the Sabbat fell heavily to both its knees, still seizing about the jaw and fingers, snorting, a young steer that has just been stapled through the snout.

Ms. Woeburne cringed. This is not pity, either—it is revulsion, an awareness of the unfair that has existed in Ventrue for ages when faced with the flailing of other peoples, so easily and disappointingly stomped.

LaCroix approached the lone creature. There was no fear in the Prince's expression, but a bland, routine interest, as a lion might regard the scramblings of a rabbit beneath the casual suffocation of its paws. He held out a palm face-up.

The Sabbat stared at it; all its little, white-eyed, fiery hates had gone quiet and blunt. Spit ran from the corners of its mouth.

"Now. Give me your sidearm," the Prince instructed. It is not magical. It is just what he sounds like—what they all sound like—the patrician's voice, the tidy emperor, polished stones dropped into a scotch glass, one-by-one-by-one.

It did.

LaCroix took the knife and studied the craftsmanship, an afterthought, something he was accustomed to doing, though the craftsmanship of blades has become another bygone concern. This one was like all the others in every way. So, satisfied with that bland reality, the Ventrue hefted it once, then shoved the machete point-to-hilt straight through the side of the Brujah's throat.

It was not a smooth, unhindered thrust. It was more of a chop. There was an interruption of neckbones, and the knife stopped, halted by a spine, having severed the windpipes, having ruined the jugular, having halfway taken off the head.

In the interest of not making a worse mess, the Prince left it there. Crimson welled around the edge of the implement until there was no more room, and then, as if anticipated, the seam began to leak, splitting around the knot of the Adam's apple, flooding the collarbone, speckling Sebastian's polished floor. The Sabbat gurgled for a few moments. Soon after, still paralyzed, it fell to its side and began to expire, slowly, in the center of Venture Tower's tallest floor.

The thing died for a good five minutes before backup appeared. Eventually, four ancilla with drab faces and drab suits entered, guns in their pockets, hands at their hips. Ms. Woeburne spoke with them for a moment or two. She looked like someone who had just witnessed a gruesome automobile accident—the faraway eyes, the automatic gestures. The Seneschal gave her account. They nodded and looked around with more threatening agency than they had. Then the squadron departed, and several more minutes later, some bewildered footmen appeared to drag the corpse-in-progress away. Ms. Woeburne plunked back down into her chair.

The Prince, too, had sat. Frowning, he interlaced his fingers, glanced at the red smear-trail left behind, and obviously pondered whose head would roll for this one.

Some monsters you cannot reward with the sight of your fear.

"I am sorry about that," Mr. LaCroix said, rearranging a few papers, though nothing had really been displaced. "It's been a few years since we've had a security breach. I had assumed the ambush period was over. Let that be your lesson in assumption, then."

You can see that, despite Ms. Woeburne's limitations, he has done her a service. She has been whetted through trial-by-fire. This is the only way to really make a Ventrue. It is the way Sebastian LaCroix was taught by his own predecessor—by the squeamish, selfish Viscount de Viron, who had picked a Childe he did not deserve to do what he could not.

If you are a soldier: let yourself be tossed across the coals. There is little you can do to avoid it. If you survive, you will be a stronger breed of metal, surely. You will pay the price of genetic supremacy and come out finer for it.

"I didn't—it's just that—well. I'm all right. It's no trouble," Ms. Woeburne told him, wincing, smoothing her brown hair, having no idea how fortunate she is. "It is what it is, isn't it."

"It is," the Prince said, and set out to finish what he'd come here to do.


	88. On the Origin of Species

Ms. Woeburne was peeling off pantyhose when her phone rang.

"It's about time," the Seneschal snapped, flopping onto her uncomfortable leather couch to yank the last cling of brown spandex off her heel. She bunched it into a haphazard ball and lobbed it over the couch. One leg caught on an edge of glass coffee table; the other bounced somewhere by her TV. "I have had one hell of a night, let me tell you. It has been a fucking day. I can't get into it yet—no clearance; it's pending—but let me put it like this: Either a Bishop has gone kamikaze, or this culling effort of ours hasn't been going as swimmingly as I hoped. Did you receive my surveillance report?"

" _I got it. We have a problem."_

' _Of course,'_ she spat, just to herself, feeling the stress pick up drumsticks in her head. Two fingers pinched a flap of skin between the Ventrue's eyes, and her stomach was bubbling softly, a strange, furry-footed sensation that made her imagine the organ filling up with ants. She'd a bad feeling this might be waiting. A missed call from Rodriguez had been sitting in her inbox, no message attached; she never programmed the Anarch's private number. She couldn't stand to put his name down.

"You know, I really thought," Ms. Woeburne sighed. "I really thought I might get some sleep. But what was I on about. What problem? And you had better not lodge a complaint about me, because I don't see how I could have possibly been more thorough. Not without sneaking into Santa Monica myself. Not unless I'd pasted a camera under Voerman's bedstand. And I don't imagine anyone wants to see that. I don't imagine—"

" _I sent scouts through the city right after we talked,"_ Nines told her, flat and apathetic. Ms. Woeburne wasn't fresh enough to feel offended by the behind-your-back maneuver. She squeezed the receiver against one ear and began poking annoying little blouse buttons undone, decidedly not-thinking of Mr. Leonard, knowing it might do something suspicious to her voice.

"And? I hope you don't think you're going to hurt my feelings." She rubbed some soreness out of her arch and had both bare feet on the floor.

 _"I don't have details. But you need to know. While back—little while after I left my meeting with Jeanette—one of my people saw unmarked van pulled up around Fifth Street. Maybe three, four hours. My soldier said there was a ghoul behind the wheel. Now, I wanted to call that a fluke, but I just had her comb your footage for the plate numbers. We've got shots of it passing the same six stoplights all month. Which means one of those bitches has a patrol set up; if it's a reaction to our activity there or something else, we're not sure."_ He didn't give her time to toss out any of her usual theories, something that troubled S.W.; the Brujah seemed concerned. _"Jeanette swears it's not her doing. I'm willing to cut you the benefit of the doubt, London, as I can't see what you'd gain here by pissing me off. But you better be absolutely sure your hand is hidden."_

"Don't worry about that," she said. The Seneschal was becoming quite adept at offering these cardboard guarantees. She slackened into the sofa, deflating her lungs, sliding her toes forward over the shaggy gray carpet—and then, because what else was there for her to do, lurched up. Sudden energy; this is Ms. Woeburne's way of coping with danger. She rummaged in hallway closet for her house robe. Mauve—seasick color, safe. Cold fingers tied the obi over the angle of her hips. "If worse comes to worse, do you know what: the Sabbat did it. Two can play that game. That's their playbook—that was the prerogative. You've probably heard, but a pack just—"

" _There's more,"_ he said, finally. She did not like that uncomfortable shift in the Baron's voice. _"I don't expect this will be a serious issue, but you ought to be in-the-loop. There was an abduction."_

Ms. Woeburne: "Excuse me?"

Ms. Woeburne: "An abduction."

Ms. Woeburne: "Didn't I just—"

Ms. Woeburne: "I—literally—JUST warned you. I told you. I said—in completely clear language—with no uncertain terms—that if you compromised my office, my districts, again—I told you if there was one more incident, and I had reason to suspect an Anarch move, I was coming for your head, didn't I? Didn't I tell you. Didn't I say."

Nines waited for the Seneschal to finish. When she paused, he began again, as though he thought his calmness would prove something to her, as though he could prove his honesty. Which did—if we are trying to be honest—hurt the Ventrue's feelings, a little. Because he should have known her better than that. He should have known a placating tone would not convince Ms. Woeburne of a thing. _"I understand that. And I heard you loud-and-clear. But this one was not us, London. That's a fact. I've got an eye-witness says whoever's driving that patrol car grabbed the victim right off the Fifth. If you want to talk to her, you can. She has been made to understand that she will cooperate with you. Let me know what you want me to—"_

But the Ventrue was not hearing it. She was having trouble hearing much of anything, suddenly; there was a crickety ringing in the recesses of her head, like an echo in a bell drum. Ms. Woeburne was standing on her feet. "And you didn't consider this worth mentioning until now? You didn't think it might be an issue to bring up. You know, in passing. As a side-note. At all. I don't think you take me seriously, Rodriguez. The next time you're thinking about withholding information from your Seneschal, march yourself downtown, consider the Sheriff, and realize it would take me three words. One sentence. It is not your job to decide what I do and don't need to know."

_"Honey, I sympathize. My Den Mother, in her infinite wisdom, didn't think it was important to tell me about this—otherwise I would have notified you. But I just found out. First thing I did was call you. Second thing. First thing I kicked the shit out of my Den Mother. But you got to realize this is news to me, too."_

"I don't care. Here's some news for you: I don't give a damn about your internal issues. I do not care. You and I made an arrangement. You need to understand that I mean what I—" But the Ventrue didn't know how to finish. A Ventrue does not lose her temper. She ought to be cold composure. She identifies the next move and makes it. "I can't care about this. Not right now."

_"It gets worse."_

"Of fucking course it does. This is a fucking disaster."

_"We're going to handle it. So here it is: I understand the abductee has connections to you. Not real worthwhile ones—I doubt she knows anything. But you need to prepare. If you want an alibi, there's this east side Toreador; he's friendly with the Cam and he owes me a favor. I can get him down here in an hour."_

Ms. Woeburne started jiggling her right foot. She felt a mighty need to start criss-crossing the living room, but held it down until her thigh skin itched with the bottled-up compulsion to move. Instead, there was a rubber band in her fingers. She stretched it wide and snapped it forcefully around her tired circlet of of hair. "Back up. First off: you're going to give me this Toreador's name. Secondly: you haven't told me who the victim is."

A pause.

 _"I don't know how this happened or why,"_ Nines said. _"But they picked up that thin-blood. Used to work for you. Name of Harris."_

He slipped it in like she'd forgotten.

The Seneschal stopped twitching with ten naked toes dug into the prickly carpet and touched, absently, the highest point of her left cheek.

She knew that her mouth did not taste like grief—at least, not like it had before. Before the change and all of this. She knew there was no sagging against the fist of nerves above her belly-button, the warning that comes before you cry. Cool, clean air stood the follicles up along her arms. Fear, yes; fear and this mild plunging sensation in her throat, like someone had tripped over a cord; like a storm had thrown the stabilizers off and a captain banked the ship too quickly. It was just a scabby little grudge. It wasn't much to scratch off your elbow and flick away.

The fingers on her face pressed harder.

"I see," she said.

A moment passed. Ms. Woeburne waited to feel something. She felt chilly, mostly, and shouldered the purple lapels back up either side of her neck.

" _What do you want me to do?"_ Rodriguez asked.

She puffed out a mouthful of air, a telltale sign of her chagrin at not being sure what to say. "I don't see what else you can do," the Ventrue said, abruptly, tasting leftover wax on her bottom lip. She rubbed the dry remainder of lipstick onto back of her hand. Then it had nothing to do; the other held onto the receiver; so, before it could shake (not that it would), Ms. Woeburne perched her free fist on her hip. "She's a potential informant. You're going to have to send someone to Santa Monica. To retrieve her."

Another silence.

_"I'm surprised to hear you say that."_

"And why? I don't know what sort of officer you think I am—or how I've managed to talk to you people all this time—but I've not done that poorly," she spat. The old antagonism was foaming and creeping up her throat. "I'm not like yours. I don't let my personal objections ruin my business." And Woeburne sat heavily. And Ms. Woeburne stood up. And Ms. Woeburne paced, circling once around her den, then finally folded a knee into the wheeled desk chair, and Ms. Woeburne sat down.

_"Listen. This was not something we could have prepared for. I'm going to take care of this. But until the two of us either come up with a solution or this thing resolves itself, it's important to keep tabs on it."_

Her clarity was vindictive: "Until they kill her, you mean."

The suspension lasted two beats—just long enough for an Anarch to close his mouth.

 _"In all likelihood, Serena, yeah,"_ the Baron said. _"Until then, you have a problem, and I recommend you let it die."_

It's like nothing else, do you know. Seeing your hands and washing your hair and whitening your teeth and never quite seeing yourself anymore.

It's like chrysalis.

It is, and if you look into that mirror for yourself, she has found—clear, like lakewater, but distorted somehow, somehow malformed—you might find you have lost it. Or—worse—you find you have not, not quite, not yet—not suffocated the final dregs of your guilt and the flick of your ego and the rumblings of conscience—not quite thinned the thickness of your eyebrows or the dark under your eye—not quite done it—not yet murdered the hard, tiny, dark gland that can shiver and feel pain.

It is better to become something you do not recognize at all.

She smoothed the rising sense of doom down—a primordial, upsetting thing—a lowering of hackles along her vertebrae. She ground her teeth. She shut her eyes and swallowed her spit and exhaled. And she listened, very hard.

"Don't," Ms. Woeburne said. "Don't ever. Don't ever call me that again."

" _What?"_

"Don't insult me," she snarled, calm peeling like an egg skin. Her organs felt parched. She wanted anything to bleed.

Ms. Woeburne did not think she had ever hated so much in one second as she had hated the set of those sad old syllables just now.

And him, too. He sounded honestly confused. She hated him, too.

They are the children of the colonies, the Ventrue and the Brujah are. And maybe they are cursed to hate each other so much because the hardest thing is to look into a mirror and see what the machine has taken from you.

The confusion gave way to something more familiar. _"I don't need you to get along with me. I don't need you to do anything,"_ he told her. Normative, this hostility; normal, that is; it was Business As Usual. Unable to hold it so close any longer, the Ventrue set her telephone on the edge of her desk and clicked on the speaker. She had to collect all this. The word is _contain_. She did not feel sorry. She felt like vomiting, like she needed some forceful, immediate way to clean out her insides, to purge this rusting black material inside her. She wished he would stop talking. She wished this city would end quickly and that everyone who needed to die was dead.

" _Like I said, consider this as me repaying a courtesy,"_ Rodriguez was saying somewhere halfway across downtown. She should be listening. She required a commitment, an anchor, something to hold herself down. _"I was just telling you about getting a statement. This friend of mine, this Toreador—I'll put you in touch. He'll say whatever you want him to say."_

Ms. Woeburne's dizziness weakened momentarily. Her nails had pierced the porous upholstery and found their way into the spongy stuffing of her chair. "Stop. No. That's another witness. I can't—I won't have that. I can't deal with this. It's not an option. We are never bringing your 'friends' into this. Am I clear?"

" _You don't have to deal with anything. I told you—I already took care of it. He can be in your neighborhood in—"_

"Oh, why!" she cried, snorting, outraged, on fire. "You really want to bring someone _else_ into this shit show? For what fucking reason. Why the fuck would I want allow you to make another witness? So we can take him in a room and blow his brain out, too?"

Her stomach hurt—a pointed, stitch-pull pain. She gulped and it burned like lemon juice; it was difficult not hawking that stinging out, spitting it onto the floor.

" _I don't see what the big fucking deal is. I made a sugges—"_

"I don't give a damn if you can see it or not! _You_ have nothing to lose. You are already off the grid. I have a title. I have an axe over my neck. I mean, my god. Is that how you describe me? 'This Ventrue who owes me a favor?' Christ." Her lips smacked. "I'm going to be sick," she said to no one in particular.

There was no compassion here for her, and Ms. Woeburne did not want any. _"Get it together,"_ he barked. _"You can't afford this squeamish shit and I don't have time to let you work around it. We have too much riding on Santa Monica."_

"WE do not have anything," she swore from deep in her belly, needing to have it heard. "YOU want Santa Monica. YOU got tied up with the Voermans. YOU shot Nicky Shih."

" _No, hold the fuck on. Uh-uh. No god damn way. You don't get to pull this double-back shit in the eleventh hour. You brought him there knowing damn well what we were going to—"_

"I want the Hallowbrook Pack controlled—that is as far as my interests reach."

_"You backpedal awful fucking fast, don't you. This thing is YOUR skeleton, Ventrue. Not one fucking fingerbone less than it is mine. I already told you I don't think it's going to do any serious harm. But on the off-chance this does become a problem, you'd be smart to make use of the little aid I am offering."_

She pushed out her unkind laugh. It tinkled in the Ventrue's nose and made her feel woozy all over again. "And I'm supposed to accept this offer just like that? To put my name in the hands of some two-timing Toreador hack from East LA because _you_ vouched for him? I'm not a soldier you can order around. Furthermore. _I_ didn't feed a fledgling intelligence and lose her. You lit this bomb; it is your responsibility to defuse it."

_"You forget how this thing went, London. You got betrayed. Whatever 'intelligence' she had, she stole it from you."_

"She's a _girl_ , Nines. You are talking about a child. She did it because you told her to; now she has nothing to trade."

 _"It's terrible. I'm sorry,"_ he cut, a terse, aggressive tone that was not sorry at all. _"But fact is, bailing Caitiff isn't my priority right now."_

The Seneschal breathed out again. She hoisted forward, needing to stand up again, to be moving somewhere that was not here. The wheeled chair skidded out from beneath her; S.W. caught the top before it toppled. "And what if she compromises both of us? Can you be sure you know exactly what she stumbled on. I can't. Besides that, she has plenty of motivation. If anyone has a motive to start a fire under me, it's— " She did not bother finishing. She wasn't sure how to put it, or how insistent, how angry, he expected her to be. "The plain fact is, you have no idea what kind of damage she could do. Just a lie could sink us. You should know that. You, of all people, should—"

_"Why the fuck do you think I'm talking to you?"_

"Then take this seriously!"

 _"Seriously,"_ the Brujah said, not expecting the force of the bitterness that came with having a Ventrue scold him. _"Let me tell you something, Seneschal. You're not the only one in LA with a giant motherfucking target painted on their head. I got Sabbat knocking in the goddamn door down here; I got you fuckers cutting at my fence; I got people dead and, on top of that, blood-witches throwing plague charges around on the sidelines. I don't got time. I do not have time for this shit. And,_ _Ms. Woeburne_ _,_ _that's why you're going to choke down your great big blueblood ego and agree to the fucking statement. Because if you don't learn to reciprocate the ground you ask for, you're not going out surrounded by corporates. You're doing to die in a ditch. And you'll be alone."_

Ms. Woeburne leveled her tongue tip against the ridged pink roof of her palate.

"You used her," she said. "You used an idiot child to gain leverage and now you're going to let her die. Why should I rely on you to mean or do anything you say?"

" _You sure as hell have gained some leverage off me so far,_ " he growled back. _"Answer me this: why the fuck would I be trying to screw you out of the Camarilla when they're the only reason you're any use to me? We're not new to this routine, Woeburne. Who are you, anyway? You're the one throwing your pedigree around like it's some sort of fucking title. So why don't you just tell me what your issue is? Is this about her, or is this about me?"_

The Seneschal's temper rerouted. It became a crackle of pain in her gut. It became a grimace of cramps beneath the lungs, a rising penny taste, foaming in the nadir of the throat. "My issue is that this isn't MY issue. You're speaking in the past tense, like the girl's dead and gone. But she isn't dead yet. This is about culpability, and the fact that you—"

" _I didn't plan on it turning out this way. But she's not my problem anymore."_

"Not your—?" Ms. Woeburne had no appropriate outlet for her outrage, so she coughed. Once—fiercely, to herself—a constriction of the throat like cannonfire—a lurch of that bubbling rise. "This isn't a matter of delegation, Rodriguez. This is your responsibility. You seduced her. You convinced a sireless Caitiff that you were her friend, that you'd foster her; you made this player; and now you can't be bothered?"

" _So did you."_

"I don't walk around spewing Marxist make-friends bullshit! I never claimed to be Saint-fucking-Jude!"

" _You don't expect me to buy that. You don't expect me to believe that you still think Jyhad's something you-people confine to boardrooms? Tough chance. You're not that much of a bleeding heart, London. And I know you know I'm not."_ A vacillation. It was time to chew on the inside of her cheek. What else? Empathy—a weedy emotion that rotted beside Ms. Woeburne's kidney. She resented it. It is one of those simmering notes that is never worse than when it's directed at you. _"You don't have to do this for my benefit. I realize how it works. Kid did you a bad turn, she made some stupid decisions—if this is her last one, that's a shame, but it is. You know that. I know that. You can stop pretending you give a fuck. You can stop pretending like you've got some kind of moral ground to stand on with me."_

"I never proselytized. I never made friends. I never made anyone like me. I never made anyone think I was anything apart from what I—"

 _"You are the same kind of animal I am, snake,"_ he told her, final, biological, and it made something in Ms. Woeburne shiver. It made some ghost of an ancient organ lose its teeth and start ticking and shake like she had not in fifty years gone hot. _"I can see what you are."_

The Ventrue bared her teeth to an empty gray room. She could see the Anarch's narrow look, the indecisive color of eyes that alleged too much. She wanted them ripped out. She wanted to see if the Brujah spell broke with these reduced to dark holes in a mute skull.

"I am not one of your meat-shields. I am not one of your people. _I_ have a sense of where I stand in the world and what I may or may not do within it. And here's what sickens me the most about you: I might not make a spectacle of it, I might not let it control my actions, but I know my responsibility, and I _do_ give a fuck." She came dangerously close to screaming it.

" _You should. But I don't think you do."_

Ms. Woeburne thought about throwing her phone into the wall and never speaking with Nines Rodriguez again.

 _"Do you what you have to. That's what we do."_ He kept talking. Choke on it, she thought, stomach clenched, blazing. Tear the tongue right out of your mouth. An Anarch should choke to death on the soft red meat that facilitates truths and untruths like this. _"You don't need to rationalize it. And I don't need a show. You want to know something else? That selective morality of yours is getting old, Woeburne. Shoot people like there's no tomorrow—real people—not you-people. Compromise your credibility when you're under a crosshair. Sneak around your Prince to cut a bargain with me. Then you squirm when the casualties come in? Give me a break, Ventrue. This is what you people do. It's what you've always done. You always knew this is how it works."_

"Oh, fuck you. I did not extend those stakes to her. She was never our people. She never thought so. I never told her that. Never. I never led her to believe she was in my house. In my family. I never lied. She is not. She is not one of our people. This is not my responsibility. And this is not our baby to bury; do you hear me; do you understand?"

He didn't hesitate. _"And it's not one of mine."_

Ms. Woeburne looked at the phone sitting unkindly on the polished oak. She had nothing else to say.

"Her," she said.

_"What?"_

"Her name," Ms. Woeburne said, "is Lily."

" _We play the same game, London,"_ Nines said—so London hung up.

The room was quiet.

Her knees were cold. Ms. Woeburne, turning the flat phone face in one hand, stood. These overhead lights were cool and lidless. Her stockings were still latched to one corner of coffee table, dangling off that hideous abalone shell. Her abdomen hurt. She pocketed the cell, but did not like its sagging feel against her hip. It sat better on the table. That way she didn't have to touch it. That way she didn't have to think about it—or how Lily had ruined her own life—or if some thing, some one else had ruined it for her—some lack of hearing—some essential piece missing from a handshake, a pat on the shoulder, a smile—someone who said all the right things with a bad valiant heart—someone who knew the right thing to say but did not, chose not to, who let her self go to static and black water—and she did not have to wonder what it meant. Ms. Woeburne could keep working. Ms. Woeburne could bury it beneath a pile of paper and bulletpoints and forget how she had become some good-corporal thing that was not quite herself any more.

It was like looking through a window covered with ice. She had been too busy looking at the nice, immaculate newness on the glass to see it—to see into it—to look and notice she could not find her reflection any more. It was like landing a big, brilliant fish to find it had died in the catching. The first hook dug in years ago. It'd seemed like a small thing, a gradual thing, a smart move to make, a small price to pay. She was a new creature, and this was new life. It seemed like the best thing she could do. It seemed isolated, manageable, watchable, yes, contained. Repugnant, questionable, but concealable—a blackhead on the crisp track of a serious personality, easy to cover-up with this gift that had been given to her, picked out for her, a first-day mint-green career. Now looking back was like oblivion. That person was like a wink of light, a sparrow bone, being siphoned through the eye of a black hole. She was full of barbs. She had been growing up. She had just happened to look down at her bigger fish body and saw her belly full of grapnels, iron pips, stretching the skin whenever she tried to move away.

The girl was going to die not because she had been especially stupid but because she had belonged to Ms. Woeburne, London Branch—and because even with that and even with a pretty handful of safe, easy money, Lily Harris still had too much of her self in herself.

This was too surreal. This metaphor was too fucking much. This robe was too thin and it did not keep her warm. Maybe if she walked into the bedroom—stripped, washed, slept with a gun beneath her mattress—she would wake up all right. She would not be pulled out of the ocean and clubbed on the head. She would not let a sinking Baron drag her down because she was Sebastian LaCroix's. She would return. She would put some of it back. She would not allow them to leave her selfless, poured out, waiting to die.

"I'm not dead. I'm not. Not yet," Serena said. The declaration rested quietly in her vacant apartment with its tall, perfect, white-washed walls.

Some things can un-change, she thought, breathing. Some things must, surely.

 

**II.**

 

It was dry as a nasty old biscuit in Santa Monica that night. Not a dark cloud or a drop of rain to be had.

Ms. Woeburne tried to hear herself think. _The Asylum_ 's bass vibrated every window in her car, and despite herself, the Ventrue felt annoyed by it. She could hear aimless fireworks exploding in cool air somewhere near Clover Park. Ocean, bonfires, a strange whiff of pepper in the air. The street lamps were all dressed up for Christmas. The sky churned coldly that evening—like, on any other day, it might thunderstorm, chasing everyone off the beach with their hands steepled over their heads.

S.W. stopped her car in a condo parking lot, threw one unhappy glance up and down this shady side-street, and pulled out the keys. Her pistol rested snugly inside a flap of black peacoat. Satisfied as she could make herself in the current situation, in her current city, in this confused current year, Ms. Woeburne got out, locked down, and walked quickly up the cold pavement toward Santa Monica Medical Clinic.

She'd studied her own video for an hour. Now that the Seneschal knew what to look for, a patrol van was easy enough to spot. It was white with tinted windows, grungy fenders, a bit of rot under the passenger door. It pulled slowly up the curb beneath a Fifth Street stoplight, lingered a moment, then passed her camera and moved on. Clear enough, suspicious enough, close enough to what Nines had told her a while ago—but S.W. wanted, as ever, to be sure. She wanted to be sure the Anarchs had not been lying to her. She needed assurances this was not a decoy or a feint.

And Ms. Woeburne _wasn't_ sure, to be frank with you. But the Ventrue had a decent slice of confidence that, if she happened to peek from the beach access garage around three o'clock, there it would be: inconspicuous, boring, probably driven by a Voerman Properties employee. And what do you know: there it was. So she had wheeled after it—lagging along the patrol route, careful to decelerate, five or six car lengths behind—until they wound up in an alley outside the local 24/7 blood bank.

Oh, come on. Could you be any more obvious than that?

There was nothing obviously wrong with the hospital, of course. Not besides the obvious cut funding, that is, and the dripping pipes, and the black mold—it was not exactly a venue senators bring their sons for tonsillectomies. And, if Therese Voerman's staffing policies were any hint, it was probably distributing blood bags, and definitely stuffed with ghouls.

S.W. had just seen one, in fact. He clambered out of that parked van, dropped to the sidewalk, and entered the clinic through a dreary backdoor.

' _Well, pup. Here's to haring off halfcocked,'_ the Seneschal toasted herself, patted her six-shooter, and clambered after him.

"Excuse me—!"

She tried diplomacy, though it came out sharp and thorny, so there was not much try in it, at all. The ghoul stopped where he was in the backstreet threshold and looked at the besuited woman coming up this alley toward him. His forearm arm held the unpainted metal door. Ms. Woeburne knew if she moved too fast or sounded too shrill he would pull it in and let the way slam shut.

"You-there. Yes. You. I have questions, please. I have business. You know what I mean."

"Me?" he mouthed, poking himself in the dip of his chest, looking innocent and being snide.

"Hold that door," the Seneschal barked, but he, of course, did not.

The ghoul looked satisfied as he stepped back and let it latch. S.W. flashed a livid look through the small, square porthole and rapped. Gangly carrot-top blinked at her from the safe side of grimy glass. His face twisted of servant—clean scrubs, wide eyes, violent dimples. He was used to encountering people like her. Beyond him, she could make out claustrophobic stairs and a light glow in anodyne green.

The minor monster glanced over Ms. Woeburne. He cracked the door barely enough to speak. It was not even sufficient to get just one finger through.

"Look at this," sighed a crooner's voice, one that scraped like a garden hoe over broken rocks. She felt the apprehension flash up her spinal column and tease up all the hairs. The Ventrue did not care for his stance, chemical smell, or the way those opaque eyeballs were glinting her way. He reminded her of a goblin shark. She sharpened the meanness of her stare. "You're very impatient for a corpse," the ghoul observed. "Who exactly do we have here?"

"Inspection," she bitched—that's it. "Prince's Office. And I do not have the time. I do not take kindly. You'll let me do my job if you want to keep yours."

First setback of the night: ghouls with the foresight not to take Kindred threats at face value. The boy's nametag glistened bronze; she didn't bother reading it. "Oh, no," he sassed. "I don't think so. I'm not paid to do the politics. If you have to _inspect_ something—" (Said with derision.) "—you're going to have to take _this_ —" (More derision; he flicked out a forefinger and waggled it up and down S.W.'s somber trench.) "—to Queen Bitch. So, if there's nothing else…"

Her words impressed themselves through the insufficient space:

"OPEN THE DOOR," she boomed—and this, yes, was enough.

Colorless, he reached for the knob and swung it open.

The moment it was wide enough to get an arm through, Ms. Woeburne plunged in her fist, grabbed a fistful of scrub scruff, and hauled him outside. She pulled the pepper spray out of her vest pocket and proceeded to empty the entire canister into his face. Then, while he was lying there screaming, she snatched up his key ring, stepped inside, and locked the door.

It was desolate and noisy inside. Streetlights sealed off behind her, all S.W.'s black-and-white angles were bathed in that anesthetic off-blue. She was standing in a deserted stairwell, shut-off from the main clinic, hearing the whirring of electronics and occasional waiting room moan. The ghoul's howling and cursing outside had been muffled to satisfying dull squawking. Above anything else, the smell of blood—pungent and carmine from somewhere downstairs, stirring but unappetizing. She pressed on at a serious canter. Her stout, somber shoes clicked softly down the concrete steps.

The hospital's bowels were as empty as its backhalls. She listened to the nurses' tennis shoes squeaking upstairs, hurrying from one burlp, yelp, and hurl to the next. Her heels bounced boldly off the dingy white plaster. An overhead arrow reading BLOOD BANK pointed her all the way down.

Voerman Properties, to Ms. Woeburne's knowledge (which was not under-researched), did not own the hospital; she'd focused her attentions on controlling the blood trade downstairs, for if Therese hadn't, someone else would. It would've been even better to poke around the ex-Baron's main offices, naturally, but that was not an attractive option—which is to say, it was not an option at all. Understanding that, the bank's database wasn't a bad place to start snooping. The ghoul was probably still flailing outside. If push came to shove, he could be taken into custody. She could hear old computers whirring away.

The stairwell took her to a cramped dead-end, some spotty tiles, and a locked red door. She tried three keys before the fourth slid home.

Sure enough, the last sterile corridor Ms. Woeburne sniffed out led her into a cramped computer room, dismally dark with old corkboard gathering pushpins on the walls. Some of the pipes were exposed. Five monitors sat precariously on a square of cheap plywood tables, one bubbling up a screensaver, indicating recent use. Promising.

Her perfunctory search for cameras came back clear, so S.W. locked herself in and flipped on the lights. They flashed awake with a power surge _szzt_. That done, she circumnavigated the hobbled coffee table, avoided the crushed cans of energy drinks, ignored the vending machines, passed someone's flaccid yellow armchair slouching in the corner and shook the idling PC awake.

CLEAVER.V was logged-on.

There was no time for anything but a few brief word searches, and Ms. Woeburne did not bother sitting down. She bent over the keyboard and smacked in phrases a Ventrue would use.

Located: a personnel document, a list of Santa Monica's biggest blood trade cash cows, and a text file titled FREEZER CODES. She sleeved her fingerprints off the keyboard and stood up straight and scowled.

"What a waste of my time," the Seneschal grumbled, right out loud.

And she turned to go, but—as if in reply to her compact, irritated voice—there came a dull, echoing thump of something hitting drywall, as if thrown from the opposite side.

The vampire stilled, silencing her heels, pressing down both sides of her black gabardine coat.

She heard it again: a curt, stubborn thud. Then a pause. Then an insistent, rushed series: _thud-thud-thud!_ It sounded like a basketball bouncing off old backboard. It was coming from somewhere just beyond the vending machine, close enough to rattle few fruit gummies in their holsters. Woeburne pressed her ear against the spot, gave it a knock back, and listened.

It was probably a boiler, of course. But you know it never hurts to double-check.

"Excuse me?" she asked into the wall.

The boiler let out a muffled, exuberant squeal.

"Stand clear," the Ventrue said. "I'm coming through," the Ventrue said. The Ventrue said: "All right, then."

Ms. Woeburne shoved the vending machine, upsetting its balance. Then, once it was rocking, coins rattling, she heaved herself forward and dumped the whole thing over, sending it crashing through plasterboard and scattering splinters across the glum hospital basement floor.

Starbursts and Mentos exploded against the plastic. Woodchips erupted. Powder rose, carrying up an unpleasant aroma of rotting lumber and spray paint. S.W. pushed the upended piece of equipment aside with some difficulty; it left a gaping, toothy hole leading into a claustrophobic chamber flooded with dust and layered in dirty white tile.

Fingers on her gun, just touching it—just to be sure—the officer ducked through.

She wasn't sure what she expected to find. It probably wasn't this.

Lily dangled on the other side of the gypsum plaster, handcuffs looped around an overhead water pipe, one thick squarelet of duct-tape strapped over her mouth.

Ms. Woeburne could see the rusting cuffs of other prisoners who'd come before. They hung limply down the line. It was like a meat rack, she thought, absently horrified—like a place to hang dead cows by the snout, to dry out your prime rib. Blood stains mottled the drains. It was difficult to see Lily Harris here. Her gingery hair was matted to her face, damp clothes trickling off emaciated, trembling limbs, ruined from the effort of suspending her weight. Scabs crusted her bare knees. There were no shoes on the girl's feet, and her cracked toes bled through her socks, some of which were missing their nails; she'd been kicking endlessly at the wall. There were no trousers on her legs, so the burn marks showed on each inner thigh. It looked as though they'd been done with a curling iron. She'd been left with some stale underwear and a sodden, oversized sweatshirt, pink sleeves scissored off to expose the plundered veins in her arms. They pulsed out of proportion, tracing long bones, losing blood from the gouges in her wrists. Hazel eyes were blackened and bulged. She could not scream and didn't have enough left in her to beg anyone for help.

Not from Ms. Woeburne, certainly, to whom begging means nothing, who is not and was never someone to fling out her arms and feel badly for you.

She'd nothing to say. She picked up her pistol. Lily flinched as though she expected Ms. Woeburne would shoot her: one neat, small caliber bullet hole in the forehead, a beauty spot between the eyes.

Do you know: since we have a Ventrue—a good, staunch, reliable Ventrue—one who is what she says she is and does not need to put on airs—if it has suited her, Ms. Woeburne could have. She would have stiffened her lip, taken the shot.

The bullet burst the chain and hit the overhead pipe. The girl collapsed in a wet heap.

Lily crumpled and cried out miserably when she hit the floor. Freezing water separated around the lead and showered them both. Bristling beneath the wet shield of her coat, Ms. Woeburne stepped forward, squatted, and sat the fledgling upright. She ripped the tape from her chin. It took pieces of lip skin and made it bleed.

Lily wasn't good for much of anything, you know. The water pressure was roaring and the girl just could not make sense of it. She stared with wild, unrecognizable eyes, deathly deep inside their sockets; neither of them heard her tongue tremble ineptly in her mouth. S.W. saw the tears and watched the teeth clack. It was a mess and she momentarily regretted removing the gag.

 _Shh_ , the Ventrue ordered, placing a sharp finger to her own pursed lips. Lily recognized the gesture and obediently shut up.

Testing the only exit and finding it locked, Woeburne cussed. She didn't have any other options, really. So she kneeled, scruffed her prisoner with one demanding hand, racked Lily's arm around her shoulders with the other, and stood. The stand was abrupt, sloppy. S.W.'s shoes scuttled and the girl's knees wobbled and she snuffled obscenely. Don't you dare, Ms. Woeburne scolded. _Don't you dare fall over now._

That said—hanging onto that filthy sweater and the cramping hand—she took a step, then, and so did Lily, still choking, dragging her toes like a baby learning to walk.

The Seneschal jostled them both back through crater she'd made, over the puddles growing underfoot.

Their escape was not impressive. Every few feet, one of Lily's wobbling hips buckled, stumbling them both over the slick linoleum. Ms. Woeburne stepped on a packet of Skittles and nearly dropped her. Every few steps, the fledgling would slump against the Ventrue's body, stare blanking, muscles melting off the tendons, a strange wink of torpor that lasted only seconds but delayed them too often to be tolerated. Shaking and slapping her cheeks didn't have much effect. Unable to frenzy—lineage, perhaps, too diluted—Lily's fatigue instead took the shape of temporary paralysis, where the child would go limp, her lips would foam, and her eyes rolled fishlike back into the skull.

Well, S.W. was not about to share blood. It was too intimate an act, and Ms. Woeburne never was a creature for intimacy. She'll deny the erosion of her personhood as long as she can. But this is a depth of sympathy she maybe never had.

And this—if not the others—is a freedom she would not take away.

The stairs were too difficult. Her crumpling charge's legs buckled uselessly, too feeble to lift each foot high enough to make the first step. After three or four tries, S.W. cursed, looped both those long, spotty arms around her neck, grabbed them, and lifted simply Lily along her back as best that she could.

They were an awkward sight; the thin-blood was taller, her toes hitting the steps awkwardly as Woeburne climbed. _Shh, shh, shh,_ the Ventrue warned again, overharsh. It was a precarious ascent and whimpering would not do. She gripped the weedy wrist that scrambled at her collarbone, feeling protrusions of bone.

Once the troublesome staircase was behind them, S.W. stopped for a moment to reassess. She propped Lily against a wall, sloppily hooded her, and glanced up the short passageway through which the Seneschal arrived several minutes ago under slightly better circumstances. Grumblings ebbed in from the clinic up front. Monitor blips. A baby was wailing, somewhere, softy. Ms. Woeburne shrugged brusquely out of her coat and tossed it over her captive, yanking the arms, with no resistance, through. It was not exactly a disguise. It would do well enough for a short dash to a waiting car.

The fledgling let herself be handled like a toddler in a dressing room. Deeming her smuggleable, S.W. buttoned up the coat, rounded her about, and gave Lily a firm bump toward the exit. They moved for the single door at a calm but focused pace.

It occurred to her, given the helpless, dead-eyed shuffling of that weak and childish body, that the thin-blood was perhaps not positive if this was a rescue or another kidnapping. And maybe, with her guiding hand going stiff on the girl's neck, she was not altogether positive, either. Ms. Woeburne did not really know why she was doing this. She could not one-hundred-percent-sure say.

It had all been too smooth, this, the effort too convenient. It had gone a little too well.

So, given all the near-misses and close-shaves and obvious bullshit that has passed, do you think she was even sort of surprised when that ridiculous ghoul swung open a men's room door behind them.

He kicked more than swung, actually. The melodrama still made the Ventrue skitter behind her sorry refugee, afraid someone in the clinic lobby might have heard, less afraid of the minor threat. Could he see, she wondered. Layers of skin had been scrubbed off the boy's face. Bloodshot eyes barely showed their irises, full to bursting, red locks of hair tangling sink water into the lashes. There was a janitor's wrench in his hand now. She saw it hanging there like dead weight, saw his eyes roving for her, hearing her steps in the hall.

 _Some people don't know when to quit_ , Woeburne thought, wheeled Lily behind her, and already had the pistol from its sleeve.

The face turned, and the second bullet of the night zipped into a frontal lobe. The silencer did its job.

They didn't run. But they did walk quickly.

 

**III.**

 

Lily did not say much in the backseat of Ms. Woeburne's car.

She sat on a crunchy bathtowel that had been in the trunk, heels touching, holding the hem of her sweater over her knees. That was fine with Ms. Woeburne. The Ventrue could still feel residual anger spoiling in her, stiffening her throat, collecting in the rise of her tongue, building inside the cage of teeth. She watched Lily dazedly sip a fifth blood bag. She tried not to think too much about anything at all.

Instead: cool, compact, impatient questions, a Seneschal's clinical need-to-know. The fledgling could not say what they had wanted. All Lily could offer was her stringy account of the raid on a washed-up, rocky knee of Santa Monica beach. They kept asking about it, she said. They—the red-haired ghoul with the twitch in his lip and the round, dishplate eyes—had kept on. _Why were you there? What did you hear? Who did you see?_ They introduced her skin to an assortment of improvised penalties. Once, after denying she knew who Bertram Tung was, a lackey had plunged her head into an icy bathtub and dropped in his electric razor. They thought she was an Anarch spy. Someone must have, at least.

"And did you tell them anything? Anything at all?" Ms. Woeburne, teeth tight, asked for the seventh or eighth time.

"I told them a lot of things," Lily supposed blearily for the eight or ninth.

"Did you tell them," Ms. Woeburne plucked, throat searing, hand-over-handing on the wheel. "About this?"

"No," she said.

"No?"

"No."

"You're sure? I mean really sure. Not a best guess. Not what you might remember. What I'm asking is if you are really, truly, one-hundred-percent positive you did not give them even part of my—"

"I'm sure," the girl told her. I am.

She said I didn't give them your name.

She said your name has only got me into worse trouble, worse than I ever was before.

"Well. Never mind, then. Maybe it's best—" Ms. Woeburne supposed, making a wide left, not-looking in the rearview, not-seeing Lily's perplexed, marooned face or how it seemed like a ream of memory. Unscheduled visits in a penthouse office, windows black with the winter, a hundred phone calls, déjà vu. She wondered if it was systematic, this face. She wondered about Sebastian LaCroix's other Childer. "—if you forget it all."

There was an empty ticking as a soft morning rain began and Ms. Woeburne turned her windshield wipers on. There wasn't enough water to have bothered. It spread the droplets in overeager, unnecessary strokes.

"Listen," she said, unwarmly, an old sore.

Lily was staring through everything around them. Eyes to leech up a world.

"I don't have much time with you. Don't bother explaining yourself," Ms. Woeburne cut. "Just tell me: where do you want to go?"

"Home. I want to go home," the child told her—immediately—without thinking about possibility or consequence or anything rational at all.

Twenty-five minutes later, the rain had blurred into a tender mist, a cold springtime more than it was a December, and a Jaguar pulled rudely up to the curb outside those tiny studio apartments on Garfield Street. Washing machines, air conditioners, brown-brick, a depressive thrum. Tacky couch cushions, inexpensive hardwood, lopsided table, an unguarded candle sitting in a cup. The girl was staring through the fog like that small front door was something that might blow out.

Ms. Woeburne released the pedal, wrenched the parking brake into place, and sat. No one moved. The driver wasn't sure she should encourage it.

A long time later, Lily finally whispered: "I should go."

"Yes," Ms. Woeburne agreed, frightened by how deftly, how neatly, these words were clicking out of her tightly held teeth. Both hand gripped hard around the steering wheel. "You should."

So she did, wrapping the crude blanket around her, making to exit the small refuge of car. The Ventrue watched, submitting to this rare sensation of not knowing what she thought. And, in doing so, S.W. almost didn't remember to tell her. She interrupted the almost-silent goodbye with a last-minute cough that stopped Lily's fingers on the door.

"Hold on. There's one more thing. There's an envelope," she managed, stiff and not excitable, forcing one-hundred-percent of herself. "In the seat pocket. Behind me. Take it. Yes, that's the one. Pay attention." The compliant rummaging stopped. "There are two tickets. They're for a seven o'clock out of LAX. To Portland. You'll be on that plane tomorrow. Do not argue with me. Believe me when I say you can _not_ stay here. If you miss this chance, someone will find you, and I will not help you again. Do you understand?"

Lily had lifted the unsealed flap. She blinked down at the printed vouchers, trying to understand them, skirting the dates and the times. But something else, too, coming out of the paper and into her hands, riffling, a bright and fresh green. "There's—"

"Twelve thousand dollars," Ms. Woeburne confirmed. "I don't know where you are planning on going—and furthermore, I don't care. I don't want to hear about it. But that should get you partway."

The girl hovered. She cracked and shut her jaw. She stared.

"Serena—" And, after a short age, for the second time tonight.

"I don't want your gratitude," Ms. Woeburne snapped. There was too much in that bare-bones blurt of her name. It was threatening. She was not sure how anyone knew. "I want you to go."

Lily went.

Ms. Woeburne watched her duck her head and step out, clinging to stretched-out sweater fabric, dingy pink. She watched her shuffle across the pavement, moving into the brief flare of streetlamp outside that door. She watched her stand alone beneath the too-bright cone of stoop light, calming her fingers, then punching a number into the weathered callbox. She had to make a couple tries. She watched the mouth saying things she could not hear; she watched her hesitate. She watched the energy exchange, the hang of mutual silence. She watched until the front doors buzzed open, and Lily Harris disappeared through them, bare feet slipping back inside an old sleeve of life. Not quite—not really—but something like it, almost. She watched the ghost-face remember enough of its old self to un-change.

Serena Woeburne sat.

"Suppose I'll go home, too," she said to no one.

 

**IV.**

 

Ms. Woeburne knew something was wrong when her tires touched Olympic Boulevard and the dark smells were too suddenly close.

It's not an intangible sense of dread that irks the Ventrue these days, you know. They don't have much room for the inexplicable and mysterious. It's rarely romantic and it isn't very poetic, either. They like mathematics. They like cold science and corroborated intelligence and hard, swingable, verifiable facts.

They do not believe in ghosts.

These days, the average Ventrue—and Ms. Woeburne is, if nothing else, that—is disturbed the most, misled the most, by detail. They have an unfortunate tendency to take them separately, you see. They tally each one and worry one-after-the-other and let them pile up. They do not see big-picture. Or at least she doesn't. In her break-it-down processing, she is too concerned by the coal and the smoke and the whistle scream to see the train bearing down.

On her way home, Ms. Woeburne saw there was police tape.

Empire Hotel had been cordoned off. A bulky row of squad cars and traffic cones sat evenly-spaced down the street, alarmingly empty now that its vehicles had already been towed away, leaving rolls of bright yellow plastic gently rippling. The police looked exposed and too-tall as they waved at one another and seemed unwelcoming. The red brick was silent and unrevealing. All the edifice lights were on full-blast.

The Seneschal eked her car into a wedge of side-street with the SUVs and Cadillacs, then got out, clapped up, and waited. There she stood, arms-folded, tight-shouldered, with the others— waiting for someone to give her an answer, feeling oddly helpless out here in the open, and normal enough to quiet a hot point inside her head.

Ms. Woeburne spoke briefly with a few of her fellow bystanders to see what they knew so far, but largely, like the bulk of them, she kept silent, watching the lawmen move with thick tongue and squinted eyes. A couple overnighters had heard gunshots. Dominating her way in there was possible, but wasteful, and at the moment, she felt a rare weariness, one that allowed the possibility of Wait-and-See.

Tap-tap on her shoulder. The Ventrue about-faced.

"Not—Beckett?" fell out of the Ventrue's dropped jaw like a squawk. She furrowed at him, forgetting her manners. The Gangrel smiled a small, forced hello.

Nothing appeared out-of-place. The scholar looked very unspectacular, actually, as though he'd just dipped out of his lab for a quick breath of fresh air. And yet there was an odd strained quality about his long face. She could not put her finger on it. He tipped his akubra brim without any genuine gladness, black hair boxing in coral eyes and that thin grimace-smile. S.W. swung out her hand to shake. The welcome did not meet her eyes; she knew she looked flat-ironed. She could not really care.

"You're here—why?" A needless question; he'd no reason to come poking around if not dropping by to see her. And he wouldn't do that. He didn't seem the type to drop by. "Sorry. I didn't mean to say it _you're_ here. I'm a little put-out at the moment. You noticed." A futile wave to the undulating red-and-blues.

The Gangel winced. His good-natured nonchalance was underscored by discomfort. "Don't worry yourself just yet. Let's… move somewhere less conspicuous."

Ms. Woeburne followed him down the block at a decent clip. Beckett did not explain, and "don't worry" hasn't worked on a Ventrue since at least 1950, let alone his. Her uncertainties ratcheted higher with each quickstep. Only when they'd left the thoroughfare behind from the vantage of a secluded far corner of parking lot—between a gray Mazda and a candy-blue VMW—did he start in.

The news was swift, curt, serious. It kicked her solar plexus roundabout to her bellybutton.

"Someone has killed my poor friend Johansen," Beckett said, cringing, an expression that was all of a sudden not snide but brutally real. "And I think I know whodunit."

S.W. wished she had coughed up a conspiracy theory of her own on this development—wished she had been concrete enough to say "I'm so sorry to hear that," or at least express a micron of remorse for the slaughtered old researcher. She would've liked to contribute in some meaningful way. But the report had seized her so suddenly and at such an inopportune time that Ms. Woeburne could think of nothing at all. She halted and stared.

Beckett saw her sober reaction and gave a nod of agreement. The Seneschal's tense shoulders braced for the bad omen and her stomach was full of air.

"Before I go on, there are a few things you should know about Dr. Johansen. I wasn't exaggerating when I told you he is—well, _was_ —the world's foremost authority on ancient Assyria." High praise from any intellectual, particularly this one. The Gangrel adjusted his glasses, a grave, bleak motion. He sighed heavily. "That he is no longer with us is more problematic than you can understand. So just understand this: I don't discredit Ingvar's scholastic worth when I say that, when he died, we lost something even more important than expertise."

A pause. The eyes looked at her with dour clarity over black lenses, waiting for her to interject. She did not. She didn't feel much like any more interjections tonight.

"Do you remember our visit to the Chicago Museum, Ms. Woeburne? The artifact I gathered there—I suspected it might be a useful reference, given my notes on similar pieces bearing the same artist marks. It wasn't that I assumed relation. I assure you, I wasn't sure how—or even if my suspicions were anything but suspicions. Ingvar was in a better position to answer this curiosity for me. Once he returned from the site, I asked him to take the thing for further study. This is why I needed a colleague close-at-hand. And, as far as I know, this is where the artifact was." Beckett's stare was frightening in how much it lacked a joke. "It is gone now."

"Was it necessary?" was all she could ask. She didn't know anything else to.

"Therein we have the issue. I don't know, and I expect he was the only person with a reliable hunch. Worse still, our clumsy perpetrator has also taken Johansen's notes. While I'm not exactly certain how close he was to making sense of the piece, I am sure that _I would be_ the only one to stand a chance of deciphering them." Another foiled sigh—that was twice in the past two minutes. "Don't take my word for it, though. See for yourself."

He reached into his burlap bag, pulled out a tablet, and passed it to Ms. Woeburne. She watched the video clip with a thin, silent mouth and an old, fraying tension at the corners of her eyes.

"It's not special clearance. This is the same footage the LAPD's got; I'm sure they're combing it apart as we speak," he told her, incidentally. "It was taken roughly four hours ago. As you see, the men were hardly subtle about it. They jogged up the stairs, found the room, and opened fire. Trained, perhaps, but not ghouls. Seems that their business was isolated to Johansen, and—I'm sure you can imagine well enough—they made short work of him."

S.W. swallowed, mouth pursing; she wiped a hand nervously down the very there bridge of her nose. The tape lacked sound. Because she had no dialogue, Ms. Woeburne looked for identifiers, breaking apart the hair colors and facial compositions in the organized geometry of her head. Height, weight, bone spacing, age; they were young, healthy, decently practiced, not infallible, but moving as though they had done something like this before.

"Gang affiliations," she said, a half-formed question-mark. "Have there been any—"

"I already checked," he cut in. "Did a bit of footwork. Chatter at Spring and Alpine. They're Wah Ching."

"In case you don't know. It's well-known that the Tong wars in Los Angeles are Ming-Xiao's pastime," Woeburne offered, back muscles painfully tight. She didn't specialize in Chinatown politics—she was Sebastian's Anarch monitor, not his Kuei-Jin detective—that was Mr. Chen's job, and he was good at it—or, at least, better than she'd have been. "It's Kuei-jin doing. Aggressive ignorance. They never know what they're doing. Never. She smells blood in the water and that is all it takes."

"I admire your confidence, young one." Beckett hummed in that usual indecipherable way, landing somewhere ambiguous on the scale between compliment and insult. Ms. Woeburne didn't care. Her insides were cringing cold. Cramping and the absence of feeling—of temperature dropping and nerves flaring where they had no reason, no excuse. The tissues clenched along her ribs. He kept talking; snippets of advice peppered in; it too hard to focus beneath the weight of the knowledge she had, chopping into itself, dicing up the certainties and the blind spots. It was too hard to think logically, rationally, when a renowned thinker looked so uncomfortable beneath his mask of arrogant calm. "But don't be so quick to point-and-shoot. Your Sire has been impatient. And that's exactly why I needed to speak with you, Seneschal, about our arrangement."

Collected as she wasn't, Ms. Woeburne had the finger on the panic button firmly enough to recognize a major debacle when she saw it.

"Beckett, _please_ —" Incredulity; oh-no-you-don't; not very faraway from a beg. "You can't do this here. Not tonight. Not like this. Not when we're this close. We are so close to knowing. I realize this is an imposition—obviously I do—believe me, I know what it's like to—I don't mean to minimize that. It's a disaster. Criminal, too. A criminal thing—a thing that shouldn't have happened—not in our city, not to yours. And I'm sorry for it. But so many of Mr. LaCroix's arrangements are depending on you being here. More than his arrangements. Really, you can't—you are instrumental to us. To our efforts here. In Los Angeles, and in the West Coast, too. You said it yourself just a moment ago. Who has the expertise? Without you, who stands a chance of cracking the—"

"I'm not sure you wholly appreciate the situation yet, my young Ventrue. And, until I'm sure _I_ do, think I'll play it safe. You may tell your Prince I'm taking a leave of absence. When I find out more, I may be back." He managed one reserved, two-second smile. But it came nowhere near his eyes. Through hers, transparent and bleak as they had been since year one—or two—or five—or all of them, since she had sat up in that cot and become what she is—the woman's heart was on a plunge. One steady tumble. Further down than she remembered it could go.

"Not now," she said. Past plea; too credulous; an avalanche, coolly riding into denial. "Not now. Do not do this now."

"If not now, then later—and later, for all you know," he suggested, a teacher's tone, but there was no mirth in it, and he had no wink for her behind the impenetrable dark glass. "May be worse. In the meantime, I may have use for those resources you offered. So please, mind your mailbox."

"Beckett, I—"

"Should be going, I'd wager. Take care, young one."

There was no time for handshakes or more imploring faces. He left her with that.

Ms. Woeburne stood on the cement, staring at nothing, teeth pressing together within her carnivore head.

Two nights ago, amidst demeaning remarks about Chicago Camarilla drones, she had told her Sire about the museum.

It seemed like nothing. He hadn't interrogated her; he hadn't raised any suspicions about Beckett smuggling artifacts. Intimidation tactics and prying never entered the conversation. S.W. had brought it up, in fact—a laughable anecdote from her Midwest experience. There was no special reason to remember. This was not at her feet.

There it was: her fishcaught heart was pounding. Thin, taken blood. A thing in coming a long, long time.

Not now, she said, to no one. Not this close.

This was an error. This is a confusion. She is boxed in and made of unbendable metals and there is nowhere else for it to go.

He said let me tell you about winning this game.

Ms. Woeburne clutched at her neck.

A siren chattered down the asphalt. Behind her—at the home that was not her home—the other lawmen were milling outside. They were snug in windbreakers; comfortable behind microphones; closed up on the safe, inside-side of the keep-out tape. She folded her arms and unfolded them and felt the threads of herself like harpstrings shivering loose.

She waited as long as she could.

She opened her phone.

 _Madison_ , she said.

The old man's voice said hello? Hello.


	89. Into the Sea

"Just the both of you? That'll be—" David Hatter's nose wrinkled as he calculated, putting dimples in the doughy contours of his face. "—four hundred for the week. Fifty square if you just want it for tonight. Twenty bucks'll get you an hour."

The man in front of him counted off fifty dollars with stiff, anxious fingers. He had dark hair and looked like a person trying hard not to be nervous. Which was difficult, given how the fireplace mumbled dully behind him in this dingy lobby, making you think of _Haunted LA_ all the time. And, given Milligan's last expose on the Hollywood Werewolf, or maybe just given the night—something about the way that red flame caught his edges made Luckee Star's concierge behold his newest tenant with a dubious, sidelong glance.

David shifted his attention to the man's female companion. She was even less comforting. David shifted back.

Everything in here seemed muted. It was that same tacky Ye Olde Hollywood color scheme: yellow paint, ratty red footstools, green glass lamps. A fake-gold chandelier with bulbs instead of wax spun gently overhead on a heavy, spray-painted chain. The dark-haired man pulled out a last shaky single and flattened everything onto the polished counter, glancing over one shoulder, searching for where the red-headed woman stood with both arms crossed.

David Hatter was an everyday guy being with wild brown curls and a just-disheveled enough face to seem sweetly helpless. He swiped and deposited the bills in his cash register; he reached under the desk for their room key, hooking it on a stout finger; his gray eyes kept watch from the corners. It took a lot more to unnerve Dave. He'd seen some scary shit working these late nights. Last week, three kids OD'd in a suite; the smell sent the housekeeper screaming Czech and 9-1-1. Place like this was creative goldmine. Real powerhouse of moral platitudes. Still, something small and quiet told him to keep his eyes peeled on the dark-haired man and this tiny red girl.

He wasn't sure why. They didn't seem all that rough compared to the regular past-midnight types you see come through here. The disgruntled redhead was short, top-heavy, dressed down in baggy camo and a cute tee; she had nice jugs and a fuck-off-asshole scowl on her mug; looked more like somebody's feminist sister than somebody up to no good. The man seemed all right; good-looking guy, clear-eyed, maybe a little sick today. His hands, weighted with old rings, seemed calmer as they took the guest register, but the face was anxious as hell. He leaned forward a little too dramatically on the counter. Maybe showing off for the girl. She was younger than him, but not enough to be scandalous. When he took too long at the front desk, she cussed under her breath, grimaced, and began pacing; little feet in flat soles smashed their shape into the ocher shag. On second thought, maybe it wasn't a tryst, because they didn't seem particularly friendly with each other. There was no bickering or drunken cuddling or immature ass pinches snuck-in when the concierge turned around. They didn't even speak to each other. There were only tense, unhappy glances thrown back-and-forth across the lounge—peripheral reassurances that didn't soothe anyone. The steel studs on girl's beret kept winking under fake candlelight. Jesus, this better not be some kind of Patty Hearst thing. That'd be just what he needed.

Dave found the right key and passed it over a coffee-stained clipboard. He probably just needed to get more sleep. _Humanity vs. the Vampire Lords_ had him up punching words into way too late. (Not much else to do, since Julius hadn't shown up for months, which meant no beach brainstorming sessions. _Hope he didn't skip town._ ) "Here you go, sir. Room 2A. This time tomorrow your rent's up, so you'll have to see me for an extension or check out. Just sign this one last thing. No, no. Right there—bottom line."

The man scribbled something illegible, took the keychain, and was at the vestibule arch. The red girl hustled after him. Her backpack bounced.

"Hey, and no smoking," Dave threw in. "I don't care what else you do, but nothing that'll light up the curtains. We're serious."

They were already through the doors.

Damsel slogged after Nines with her bag straps cutting into her shoulders. He was walking at a fast clip—about three steps too fast for her to keep up with—so she had to jog, zippers jangling, items clink-clanking in the pockets. It was all moving too fast to keep up with, to be honest.

At a sharp turn for the second-floor stairwell, the Browning almost flipped out of her belt; she caught it against her belly, fumbling to keep it from clattering on the dingy pool tiles. Nines did not wait on her. He was already past the flight and lancing down the second-floor walkway, so she quickly stuffed the muzzle back, hammered up behind him, and trotted after, following her Baron into a room and locking the only door.

It was what you'd expect of a low-budget Hollywood gig: cramped walls, bland-brown, wrinkled cream bedspread and a tiny bathroom window with blurred glass that looked more like a boat hatch. Bedside tables boasted cigar marks. A desk saved from somebody's alleyway held one depressing lamp with tears in its faceless yellow shade. The mothballed closet was a perfect size for storing your favorite hooker or your dealer or whatever else you might need to suddenly hide. A crappy TV with rabbit ears, for chrissakes, was sitting on the wood-stained dresser, and the sheets looked suspiciously like bugs. If Damsel hopped onto the toilet seat and spread her arms out, both hands bumped the striped taupe wallpaper. Made Nines's shitty apartment seem like a palace by comparison. And she wasn't exactly the princess and the fucking pea.

She wasn't a Baron, either, so she had no right to demand answers—not really—but he'd said next-to-nothing about where or why or when they were leaving. Nines had just slammed down the bar telephone about thirty minutes ago, barked "We're going!" and was out; Damsel, fast as she could, pawed some sloppy supplies together, not knowing what that meant, barely making it to the truck before he blew out of there.

She was understandably pissed off. And he still wasn't talking, tight-lipped and eyes-forward, even when his own Den Mother had begun to cuss and holler in earnest. He told her to pipe the fuck down and give him a minute to think. He said _Damsel can you shut up please and let me figure this out._

Damsel hoped Nines would be done figuring soon, because she was beyond irritated by now—she was getting slightly scared—and his to-and-fro pacing between the telephone and empty mini-cooler didn't do anything to reassure. He leaned forward onto the wall, palms pressed into peeling paint. He banged on the threshold with the side of his fist. He collapsed heavily on an edge of the desk, sinking a hand into his hair and scratching hard, gritting his teeth and breathing in-and-out, like if everything would just shut up for one more set of minutes, there would be an answer to this, and Nines Rodriguez would find a way out.

She watched about ten minutes of this before she couldn't take it anymore and said _OK you need to start fucking talking_.

"At least tell me what happened," the Den Mother needled, folding her arms, standing awkwardly out of the way with a scowl on her face like it might mean something. She dumped her satchel next to a cabinet leg and scooted it with one foot, wedging it beneath the bed. "Who were you talking to? What the hell did they say? If I'm going to be stuck here watching you flip the fuck out on me, I deserve to know why."

"Bernardino's dead. I called him six times tonight and can't get a hold of him." Nines was still slouched on the desk, elbows sinking into his knees, nails in his hairline. He didn't look at her. "We had him in on-foot in Santa Monica; he had a team with him; he should be fine. He should be, but he isn't."

That same feeling—that black dog feeling he had when St. Louis got torched. And when Jackie died. And when Rochelle had her hand on the back of his head, gripping and shaking like she had a kid, her best-little-buddy, laughing as if the suggestion of anything else was a joke. _You wouldn't never leave me, Slick, would you? Speakuh the English? Honey look in my eyes and smile at me and tell me, do you want a better job?_

Damsel, crossed arms squeezing to her ribs until they couldn't squeeze anymore, blinked. She stared at him. He could feel that chasing him, too. This child, tongue-tied, blown-back, trying to think up a reason why the worst couldn't happen. He understands a kid doesn't ever want to assume disaster. But he hated how stupid they all looked.

"—to jump to a fucking conclusion," she was saying, a flat squawk of voice. "For all we know, that asshole could be—"

"He's dead," Nines told her. Damsel watched.

"So what the fuck are we doing standing around here, then?" the Den Mother asked after what seemed like a decade.

"We need bodies," Nines decided after a minute of breathing-in, breathing-out. "I'm putting out a call on San Fran. See if we can get Christie and some of her people to LA this week." That said, he lurched off the desk, grabbing the telephone off the wall. "It's likely goin to bring an incredible shit storm down here," the Baron added, by-the-way, dial tone in his ear. "But I don't have any other options at this point."

"Jack could—"

"No," Nines said. It startled her. The suddenness of that word in the hanging air of this ugly room, the sharpness of his voice. He was often sharp with her, but not with that edge of authority; that impossibility of telling him shut-up, of yelling an empty _fuck you, Nines_ ; the dead-end implication that this is the end of her being allowed to talk back. "No, he can't. Stay the fuck away from Jack, do you hear me?"

Damsel stood in her place and she tightened her arms and she blinked.

"I'm taking a shower," the Den Mother barked, feeling her guts cramp under the trap of her limbs. The Baron was standing near the closet, hunkered against the cheep door frame, gazing dully beyond the walls. She had to get away from him. She had to get out of this room. "If you get bugged and storm out of here, all up in arms and shit, the least you could do is give me a fucking five-minute heads-up."

He didn't say anything as she strode past him and slammed the bathroom door shut.

Sealed behind three inches of cheap, solid wood, Damsel stopped. Her image, distorted by the lead-eaten glass of the medicine cabinet mirror, looked crystallized, like thick honey. _What, bitch?_ she asked with the cut of her eyes staring back. _Are you going to cry?_ She tossed a faded pink towel over it. She hooked her beret and pistol on a washcloth shelf. Damsel didn't intend on pissing around in here to think anything to death, so she stripped her clothing into a wilted pile and stepped into Luckee Star's shower. It was cold and the water smelled vaguely like rust.

By the time she looked at her feet, waiting for something that felt even a little bit warm, there was a pool of thin red running from her—hair dye. Lipstick, too, maybe. Her nails scratched angrily at the scalp that kept pushing out cheap bottled color. She was a natural redhead, but it wasn't red enough. Spots of it hit the tile, the linoleum, her hands and her arms. Of course, there was no shampoo; they only had bar soap, packaged in those annoying cardboard boxes pattered with ducks and babies and shit, so that's what she used. The texture left her skin glowing painfully inside walls cracking with black mold. No solid door in here, either—only a skimpy teal curtain, and it overflowed, soaking her army pants and the edge of her shirt before Damsel noticed. She cussed because she expected that reaction from herself. The shower knobs were idiotically high and it made the not-so-high Brujah have to hoist up on tip-toe to reach them, not exactly dignifying. She twisted the pressure low and leant her ear to the linoleum siding. She tried to hear.

It sounded like Nines was still on the phone. His tone switched from troubled to confident at calculated degrees; he was most likely talking to Christie, and it sounded like he was getting his way.

" _Good,"_ she made out. _"Fine. Don't have a week… that's right. You need to bring… I'll see you then. You all be careful. Keep your head down. We will."_

The receiver clicked.

When Damsel first met Nines Rodriguez, she hadn't thought much of him at all. He was maybe the fifth or sixth vampire she'd been introduced to. He was some friend of her Sire's who walked up one night, pulled Jacquelyn into a handshake and dealt her a clumsy half-hug, called her "Jackie" instead of her actual name, and talked too much about things she couldn't understand yet. They switched between business and jokes like casual old friends who hadn't seen one another in years. He sat with his elbows on the table, hunched slightly forward, asking over-and-over about _holding together in San Francisco_. He didn't take much notice of Damsel (who had still been just Beth back then), and she didn't have anything to say to him.

Nines had been much more deferent and polite to Jackie than most other people she'd since seen him speak to. It was easy to admire Jacquelyn—her birdlike hands, the storyteller's gestures partially professorial; her tall, wispy frame; the academic authority with which she spoke; the ease with which that voice switched between Mandarin and English; her long, slightly hooked nose and straight shot of blue-black hair, silvered nobly at the temples. Her eyes were always a little crinkled with laugh-lines. She'd been a McCarthy-era Maoist—used to be a teacher—nearly eaten by a political system she believed could still maybe work out some time, somewhere else. Which wasn't hard to see; Jackie had been so damned smart.

Nines thought Damsel was dumb—and maybe she was—but dumb isn't blind. He thought she didn't notice, but she did. He thought she wouldn't say shit. He relied on the belief Damsel needed him, no matter what he did or said or how he didn't bother sweetening it up for her, and because of that, she could be trusted implicitly. She was the stable element. Block one on the wall.

It was halfway true. Damsel figured out—roundabout the time the Den Mother about-faced, ran off, and left that last kid to the wolves—she doesn't need Nines anymore, and hasn't for a while. But Beth still needed Damsel.

She had figured out the basics over the years of everyone bitching at her, screaming liberty and thinking they all deserve more. Brujah kids can't pick up on the history yet. They can't see their story has been told before, and it doesn't end all that well. They can't determine where the pumpkin seed of their anger's hidden, sharp and painful, maybe stuck in a lung. All they can do is try to survive how it changes them—how it makes you want to roar your name and puke, how it stings like love gone bad. How it makes you hate anyone who isn't together with you in this whatever-thing. How it worms into your hands and brain and tissue, wanting for something to care about—then demands you hug that thing so tightly to yourself it brands you, becomes an organ of you, until you can't live without it anymore.

They don't recognize yet how badly they need someone to tell them what to do with that feeling. It doesn't have much to do with freedom once you strip back the layers of political grease and true-blue idealism. What the Brujah need is a war—because when they are not soldiers, they are something a lot worse.

On Damsel's third night of existence, she ventured alone through the doors of her Sire's balconied safe house in Detroit. It was a calm spring, fresh rain and speckled with umbrellas. The damp air felt new. So she roamed to familiar places, turning the same streets she'd walked in her past life, smelling the dark roast ebb from the same coffee shops, seeing the same parked cars. She said look, most of the world hasn't even changed.

Then she crossed an alley, wandered two blocks, and some Christian Youth pamphleteer patrolling Comerica Park tried to hand her a bible study brochure. And for reasons that do not exist—not even to Damsel—she beat the holy hell out of him. Her fists went red, pounding. There was an awful thing in his voice, she thought. If she hit it hard enough and just right, it would die off, she was sure, in yelps and bits of teeth and plaid peacoat. She wasn't sure if he died or not, because somewhere while she was choking him on the sidewalk between her two real and normal-looking hands, Beth returned to herself, and the silhouette of Damsel ran away.

The Den Mother gave her head a good shake, stepped out onto the cold flooring, and grimaced at what felt like granules of leftover sand beneath her feet. She gave the sodden clothes a useless baby-kick. Her underwear were wet and cold and putting them on made her feel vaguely sick, so she pulled out the only two towels Luckee Star had, dried off with one and toga-tied the other around herself, the knots not feeling much better under arms that were not-that-big-after-all.

When she booted the bathroom door shut behind her, Nines was still on the phone. Somebody else this time. He didn't say who when she shot a look that asked. Damsel felt like flicking up her middle finger, but honestly, it was better not to fuck with him when he got like this. Usually he was too lazy to care about being yelled at. But once in a while, a paranoid bent would hit him, and he'd be like a whole different person, or maybe less like a person and more like something backed in a corner. He would look smaller and stiffer and more compact, his motions all nervous energy, his eyes tighter somehow, the irises hemmed-in. Nines has passed his life expectancy by sixty years already with the State crumbling around them. It was better not to push him back, because men like this have already pushed too much themselves; too many people have gone off a cliff, too many bodies have absorbed the bullets. You can see the shadows of those exchanges settle over them. It's a guilty fear. It gets in behind the pupil, and makes them look like an animal that has lost its personality to the adrenaline, when the world around them has temporarily stopped making sense. They become simple. Him, too. In these moments—with the lost wolf panic contracting the chambers of his heart, making his teeth clench and his eyes race—he forgets who he is supposed to be for everyone else. Her, too. He doesn't try very hard for Damsel's sake, but even if she knows it's mostly fake, she still remembers. She remembers what he was like before. She has watched Nines Rodriguez start to lose his mind.

Damsel gave the Baron a wide berth. For the sake of doing something, she stuck one finger in the blinds and peered out. Luckee Star's courtyard was quiet; there was close to nobody downstairs. Two twenty-somes were sharing a joint behind the overgrown elephant ears out back. Someone's outline tossed back beer in his suite across the way, and a couple next door sounded about five minutes from getting intimate. Damsel wondered if Bernardino was really dead.

"Uh, listen," she said, eyes on the wall, feeling the black cord begin to coil inside her heart, too. "If you honestly think shit's hit the fan, we shouldn't be here. We leave the place hanging open like that, who knows if it'll even be standing." Wet hair was sticking to the nape of her neck and the yellow cotton beneath her underarms itched.

Nines said _shh_ with a sharp look. He was still on the telephone.

"Hell," she chuffed, mostly to herself now, arms still crossed and face looking distantly into the yard. "We can't stay here, anyway. This crappy motel isn't exactly fortified, know what I—"

The Baron cut her off when he noticed where she was currently standing. "HEY? Get your ass away from the window," Nines barked. Damsel yanked her finger out of the blinds like they bit. He shook his head and glared, palm covering the receiver. "Middle of a goddamn coup and I have to tell you not to stick your neck out? Jesus."

Times like these, she felt less like a revolutionary for the free-living-whatever and more like somebody's girlfriend, accidentally got caught up in it all. Damsel held her teeth together and tried to make herself mad again. While Nines was waiting for somebody to pick up—Sanders, Damsel figured, that bastard East Sider who couldn't stop hanging around lately—she paced the length of the dresser a few times. She wished her clothes wound dry faster. She tried thinking liberty, about the Carthaginians and the Heretics and the Scots and the Indians and Black Power and Greenwich and all that, but instead, for reasons lost to her, she kept thinking the name Patty Hearst.

They both jumped when a cell phone rang. Nines juggled it out of his pocket and answered.

" _Oh, thank God. Listen, I don't have time. I can't talk. I need your people to do something. I'd explain more but you're going to have to believe me: I have no time."_

"Take it easy, London," he said, flinging the Den Mother a significant look across Room 2A. His tone was steady and suspiciously unpartisan, but one hand waved for her to come join him beside the desk. Eyes slitted, the younger Brujah slid over, silently hefting herself onto the opposite ledge, leaning as close as she dared to. Her feet dangled and the shitty reception mangled the tight, pecking, panicky voice trying to come through. "Calm down. Make sense. I'm listening."

She glanced past the phone in his hand to Rodriguez's cheek. If he was suspicious, the old Anarch said nothing about it. _"You'd be a little less calm if you knew what I knew. Don't say anything. Listen to me talk,"_ she ordered, but it came out on shaky legs. The Ventrue must not have known about Santa Monica (if there was even anything to know), and Nines wasn't telling. Damsel's eyes flickered anxiously between the door and the Baron, who paid her no mind. His face did not match the unassuming tone he took. It was sharper than a jeweler's knife. _"I need you to have someone get an item for me. A set of files. Can you do that?"_

Dark eyebrows dented Rodriguez's forehead. Damsel, still not quite dry, had to swallow her urge to slap his arm and squawk about what a ridiculous request that was. He just said, _"I'm going to need specifics if we're going to keep talking."_

Woeburne hesitated. _"I can't tell you much. That's not 'I won't'; I can't. I realize—what that sounds like. All I can promise is that I'll share the information, and believe me: I will repay you. Not now. But one day, you're going to need something from us, and I won't care what it is. I really won't."_ She waited a moment when he did not respond. You could hear the rattle of her held-down breath over the line. _"There is a warehouse on Landa Street. It's a Camarilla data morgue. I'm sending you the address now—it's a small cache, and not high traffic. Fairly off-record. Not at a lot of fuss. Mainly my associate uses it. Joelle Leferve,"_ she told him, then stopped suddenly, audibly frowning, not sure why it had seemed important to share the name. _"I've had documents sent there. And I have reason to suspect there may be a significant series of telephone records stored in that building. The call dates should be recent and should all be placed from Venture Tower, extension six hundred. Did you get that? Six-zero-zero."_

Damsel waited for Nines to object, but he kept quiet, shooting the Den Mother a threatening look whenever her mouth unhinged just a little it.

_"The recipient is a local number, in-city, probably area code 213. I'll forward all this to you as soon as we're done. Are you with me? Nines, hello?"_

"I'm following," he gave her _—_ cautiously _—_ elbowing the Den Mother when her blunt nails began absently scraping finish off the desk. Damsel wished she had her Browning in her hand. The dull _thack_ its hammer made against the unloaded barrel made her feel braver than she really was.

LaCroix's patsy had to take a minute to cool herself back down. " _All right. Listen. This particular morgue, what I said—low-clearance and it's not all that populated. But it's still a Camarilla building. The place is accessible via company keycard. The only carriers I'm aware of are all personal operatives of the Prince,"_ she corrected, avoiding the name, like saying it would ring an alarm bell on her, make him stir from a sleep and crack one eye.

"Hold on a minute. That's the case, why the hell do you need a middleman? Can't you—"

" _Tried it. Just tried it. I'm locked. Locked out,"_ she blurted, all at once, the sound hitting her in the throat and making it seem momentarily like Woeburne was going to throw up or start choking or cry.

Nines's expression changed, narrowing and then lifting, like a man who suddenly understood what was going on.

"You're in trouble, honey."

" _No shit. I know. I know,"_ she snapped. It's disconcerting to watch these big city landslides, when the sediment beneath the corporate foundations start slipping and that deadly black tie Ventrue cool starts cracking up.

"Focus. You need to step on it. Where are you. You got a place to be?"

" _I've got a lot to do. I can't run on this. I can't wait any more than I already have. The situation's changing—fast—and as far as I know, there aren't any—"_

"You need to get out of wherever you are."

" _I'm not talking about this,"_ she swore, scraping her disparate bits of glass back together again in one spiky heap that barely held. You could hear, if you listened closely, the too-quick clack of walking suddenly drop into the slam of a car door. _"I can procure a keycard, but I can't be seen there again. I can't. If I clear security for you on Tuesday night, can your people make it look like something else? A break-in? A fire? Anything else—I don't care."_

"What _people_?" Damsel mouthed furiously at him, and was shut-up by another one of those shut-up glares.

Nines's demeanor was thinning; his façade of calmness began to stiffen around the brim. The incessant back-and-forth circling was tiring him. He slid forward until both his heels were firmly on the ground. "Yeah, Woeburne," he said, giving no indication of their current weakness. One arm folded across his stomach, a deceptively casual, protective pose. "We could probably do that, but you know I have to ask. What is this thing that it's breaking you up over it? I'm not rushing in blind, here."

Damsel had met S. Woeburne in a forum. She couldn't conjure up that strict, unremarkable face; or remember how it had winced at a plastery blemish in The Last Round's wall; or recall, right then, how badly she'd wanted to hit the throat beneath it. _Bitch_ , she thought, but it didn't feel real _—_ not even when she closed her eyes and gritted her teeth as hard as she could.

" _I'm coming to you with this,"_ she said, over-enunciating, swallowing too much, pinning down her resentment with the sluice of obvious, rising fear, _"because this is the quickest option I have. I am only telling you because every centimeter of data in that building is encrypted. You won't be able to read anything but the labels. Unless you work with me. And I'm offering that. After,"_ she stressed, a poor temptation, a smeared underline. But you could hear the desperation. Mean and wide-eyed, turning fast angles, like little sharks that know the big jaws are around a corner. That, at least, was real. _"After you've done what I ask. If you can get it, I'll set up a drop—"_

Nines was curt now. "Woeburne, I will not fuck you around. This sounds like a one-way trip, and dead or not, I don't get off easy when somebody from this den breaks a law. I am prepared to go ahead, but you understand I can't make a call like that without knowing what I'm sending some kid to their death for."

 _"Nines._ _What can I tell you? You're going to have to take my word for it."_

They both balked aloud at this, pulling away from the receiver to snort. Damsel hated the way she said his name.

"That's funny, senator. Now the time to joke? Now the time to be picking at straws with me?" Rodriguez's fangs glinted for a second in the dim light of their room.

Seneschal LA didn't like being asked this. The Ventrue was a taut ball of pressure; a hypocrite who loathed _—_ on her best days _—_ being met with the same brand of sarcasm she kept between her wallet and her gun. _"No,"_ she told him, deadly clear. That single word communicated a great deal. _"This is not a joke. I know it's a risk, I know, but can't you appreciate what I'm risking? By allowing an Anarch in a Camarilla morgue? With a pass I provided? On the faith you won't turn around with a handful of data and fry me on it?"_

"If I could run off faith, London, I wouldn't be where I am right now. I need a plan. So if you've got nothing else…"

There was another hiss of static. Someone called their Luckee Star number, but he ignored it; when Damsel moved to pick up, Nines shook his head. _"If I'm right—IF my suspicions are correct—then this will be big_. _Regime-change big. Internal trials. The border could look different in a matter of months. Jesus, I can't exactly go to the Sabbat. I understand that what I'm asking from you is not an easy thing. It isn't an easy thing to trust a Ventrue, but it has to happen. Don't you want to be among the first to know, anyway? Don't you want to hear from the source?"_

There was a silence. His voice dropped to glacial range.

"Let's get one thing straight right now," Rodriguez said, tendons tightening along his jowl. This was the tone Damsel heard the most; the tone he didn't bother softening or persuading with. "You do not ask me for a favor and then talk to me like a child. You say 'first to know,' but what you mean is 'when it's convenient to me.' Tell me something. Where the fuck are your contingency plans? Did you even consider _—_ given the possibility that I just might decide not to go through with this shit _—_ the fallout if it goes sideways? What's to stop me from kicking you to the curb, kicking that door down anyway?"

As if Damsel needed yet another reason to hate a lawman: her answer was a motherfucking list. _"A: You'll be shot, because I won't clear it. B: You won't have access to get up the stoop. C: You'll have done it for no reason. Your people will die empty-handed. It's a pointless risk. Wait for me, and all you'll pay is one soldier. One soldier. It isn't much,"_ _she said, and a tin soldier knew it, probably better than anyone else._ _"It's nothing you'll notice gone."_

The Den Mother could've spit right on the floor. Every one of Seneschal Woeburne's tidy little bullet-points made her want to make somebody pay. Nines didn't say anything. He was deciding how angry to be. His displeased face was impassive, the inscrutable color of deadness. She didn't interrupt him. There was a vein somewhere between her temples. It itched, nagged, demanded something of her _—_ but Damsel had hit and hit and hit over the years, and wasn't sure what that drumbeat of blood wanted anymore.

Nines Rodriguez hadn't specifically taught Den Mother LA a great deal since that Sabbat kamikaze made him her Sire. Damsel didn't hold it against him _—_ not really. She wasn't Embraced into this den; she was an orphan who puffed up to earn her place behind him. So she'd inferred what she could through observation. This could be difficult, because Nines excelled at reticence, and she was a god-awful student, but there were a few things she picked up from watching him continue to exist. The one thing he never made exceptions for, the one rule he never broke, was the oldest, more obvious one: don't show a limp. Don't let your blood in the water. Don't let a Ventrue find out where she could bury her penknife. Because another thing the Anarch Movement had figured out well before the modern wave and before all this recruiting and way before Sebastian LaCroix had marched down to LA was that you'll never have an easier friend than a snake who has run out of new skin.

Damsel wondered if LaCroix's bitch had figured this out about him, because _—_ for all her economical talking and carefully-chosen words _—_ she said: _"I'm asking for your help,"_ and did it in such a way that Nines paused.

"If I do this," he told her. "If I put myself in front of a Camarilla firing squad for a couple papers you think are important, and you leave me with nothing but my dick in my hands, Woeburne, I swear to God…"

" _You'll get your payout in spades,"_ she pledged.

"When I'm finished with you…"

" _I GOT IT, ALL RIGHT?"_ That was the end of their business.

Damsel looked to Nines. He was hard to read from his square of desk, still holding the cell between them, the plan-ahead stare of a man playing chess with no pawns.

The Den Mother didn't know if it was right to say she admired Nines Rodriguez. The word implied a certain envy _—_ a desire to emulate and internalize something, to make it an operant part of you. Damsel didn't want to be anything Nines Rodriguez. He was not something that ought to be reproduced. And maybe there was something else, too _—_ some dark little kernel that made her guts ache, that made her try her best to dodge taking a look at herself.

There was nothing really noble about Los Angeles's new Den Mother. She did her boorish best to deserve the title and the clan. But even with all the scheming and the ordering and the keeping-from Baron Los Angeles had required of her, all the hurtful things she had said and not-said to those kids who jokingly (or not so jokingly) called her their mama, she didn't do to them what he did. Nines killed you with an idea. He warped their people badly—badly enough that Damsel didn't know if he ever truly believed what he preached _—_ but she knew _that she_ had no choice but to believe for herself. If that dream was hot air, nothing meant anything. If that dream was fake, what has she done what she's done for?

"Clear it, then. I'll get it myself."

Suddenly Cam wasn't so sure. _"That's not going to work. I approached you because I wanted anonymity. You blow that anonymity. Worse: if they suspect, which they might, I've been selling information to—"_

"Make up your goddamn mind," the Den Mother grumbled beside him. Rodriguez told her, again, to _shh._ She was getting offended with all the quiet-down, honestly, but did.

"You forget how this works, senator? I said yes. You do what you said you'd do." Nines was a stark contrast to Damsel's external hellfire and inner weaknesses. Woeburne's double-back hesitancy irritated him. Second-guessing was not something he often had to contend with among his people, even when the people were as unfavorable and temporary as this one. "Don't overthink it. Just make sure that warehouse is empty tomorrow night."

" _That's too soon,"_ she swore, stomping reverse now. _"It'll have to be Tuesday."_

The Brujah was adamant. "Tomorrow."

Ms. Woeburne didn't care for the insistence. She no longer trusted the Baron's tone, if she ever had, and her misgivings were obvious from the critical way the Ventrue paused. _"I won't. If your men set foot near this address before Tuesday, I'll—"_

"Then you're as alone as you were before you made this call," Nines rumbled at her, tongue hitting the back of his eye teeth, painful malice.

She swallowed from her driver's seat _—_ from wherever it was that bitch had to get to _—_ tasting the nothingness in her mouth.

" _Fine,"_ the Ventrue breathed finally. The compromise spoke volumes about her changing position. _"Fine. All right. I will clear it. But you WILL wait for my go-ahead and you WILL report to me immediately afterwards on terms of my choosing. Is this clear?"_

"Like glass."

Damsel looked wildly at him.

"Woeburne?" Nines asked when she offered them little else.

The Seneschal sounded sick. _"What?"_

"We good?"

" _Mmn."_

"You don't sound like it," he noted, studying the nails on his right hand.

Woeburne laughed a bitter, miserable laugh. High notes _—_ pepper, derision, a cruel thing. That laugh scared Damsel. It was the cackle of someone whose life was unspooling. _"Do you want the truth? You don't care. But I'll tell you. I wish I had never come to LA,"_ she said, clear and contentedly plain _—_ and then, after a beat, one last brittle bark of laughter. _"Hah! Really! 'We good?' Hah-hah! That's the worst thing I've ever heard. No,"_ she told him, frighteningly cool. _"As a matter-of-fact. We ain't good."_

"We do what we have to," was all he had in reply. The Ventrue thought about it.

" _I don't want to have to do anything anymore,"_ she said.

Nines was not listening well enough to pick up on this immediately, already halfway into his next point. "You know when I _—_ wait, what?" There it went. His face morphed from restrained cunning to something else. "I know you're not telling me all this was for nothing," the Baron warned her, seconds from livid. "You set this up. You called for it. I'm willing to go through. If you have cold feet now, you're right: how you feel matters shit to me. If you think you can tell me to bail after you promised me a—"

Woeburne sighed. His failure to read her confession was more disappointing to her than disheartening. She took another breath in. _"Not tonight. Not tomorrow night. All of this,"_ she went on, breathing out, creating static. _"I don't have enough left to do it. I thought I did. I don't."_

The Brujah, not sure what he was witnessing from miles away in Hollywood, hesitated. He glanced to Damsel. He tried for the rightest thing he could say. "This will all be over soon."

" _Don't tell me that,"_ Woeburne spat. She sounded like a corporal who'd been drinking too much. There was an instability to the tin soldier, an aggressive flinging of pretense to the wind that suggested someone about to die. She sounded like an officer melting down. _"I know where I am. I know who you are. I don't expect support, but I do expect candor. So if you are going to tell me what you think_ _I want to hear, there's no need. I'm used to being scared."_

"Everybody's scared, London," Nines said, and did so in a personal, certain way that Damsel thought maybe he could've really meant it. "Everybody."

Ms. Woeburne was silent. Ms. Woeburne probably couldn't disagree.

" _Do what you've said,"_ Seneschal Los Angeles ordered, and hung up; it was a weak, unhostile end.

The line went dead.

"She's not going to make it another week," Nines said. He turned off the phone and turned it over in one hand.

Damsel was worried. She'd hoped Nines would laugh, drop an unkind word and a brush-off, rant about Camarilla clowns and how moronic Sebastian LaCroix was to push his splintering cronies at the Free-State and have faith they'd swim. But he was just sitting there, largely expressionless, and it was the most frightening reaction she could've gotten. She jumped upright.

"You're not actually going to that warehouse, right?" the Den Mother pressed, eyebrows stretching toward her hairline, fists perpendicular to her hips. "'Cause this is one a screaming motherfucker of a set-up. You realize that. Right?"

Nines glowered at Damsel like she'd flat-out called him stupid. He slid the cell back into his pocket and leant forward, elbows hanging on both knees. "Obviously something is going down in the Tower. Something big enough to scare Woeburne right down her boss's beanstalk, anyway. You can bet I won't be knocking in that door tomorrow. But I don't think she was lying." Nothingness from him had been distressing; this was enough to make Damsel start yapping her why-the-fuck-nots.

"I don't have to explain myself. I don't get that vibe from her," he said simply. "You look like an idiot standing there hollering at me in a fucking bath towel."

"I am so fucking sorry," Damsel growled at him, arms pinning her breasts down. "I had no motherfucking clue this was a formal affair. Why the fuck should we even think that warehouse exists? More likely this is to get you out into the open. Nines, if you really think Bernardino and Chino are dead, this shit hotel isn't going to cut it. We've got to get your ass to the shelter. I'm serious," she added, concern softening the accusatory brow. "At least until Christie and her people get here. At least until we have some backup. I mean, what the hell do we really know about what's going on downtown? Maybe someone's trying to take _her_ out _—_ did you think of that? Maybe this is Prince Prick's way of kicking a bitch out of a job."

"Maybe. I still want to check it out."

"Then we will _—_ but let's get to the hills first. You can send Sanders to get cooked. Dickweed's dying for a chance to prove himself. Shit. I'll go, if that's what you want. I ain't scared." (She tried to ignore the scoff that never quite made it up his throat. She licked her lips.) "Why don't you get Nicky Shih on the phone; pay him one back; let him shove _his_ fuck-ups into the—"

Real hostility suddenly lit inside Nines's stare. It flashed his whole face raw, and it snared Damsel up like barbed wire. "How the fuck do you know about Nicky Shih?"

The Den Mother stalled out. Her expression blanched; her body was five steps backward until there was no more room to retreat. The Baron did not move an inch. She instantly regretted it. "Why would I—?"

He stood up much too quickly.

"You think now's a good time to fuck with me, Damsel?" Rodriguez growled; she could see his frame clench and teeth around the words. That tired disposition had one-eightied in a heartbeat and the tone wrecked to something that was no longer human. There was a very thin ring of panic suffocating the blue from his glare. She didn't think Nines would ever kill her; didn't _think_ ; but… "Nobody knew about that. Nobody was supposed to know about that. _Nobody_. How the fuck do YOU?"

She'd never given him a reason before.

"I just," Damsel got out before having to swallow, glancing down then up, waiting for him to take a step towards her and not sure if she should be relieved when he didn't. "It just made sense, all right? All this ordinance, then that Compton outpost _—_ and the figures weren't adding up. We haven't made a decent profit at HQ in moths. I didn't exactly spread that around, but there it is. I know we don't have the windfall for what we've got now. We haven't in a long time. But the firepower keeps coming, and… look, Nines." Another swallow. The Den Mother's fingers felt sticky with sweat she knew wasn't there. One arm grabbed the other _until she was making herself a_ sheepish, insecure bridge. She clutched the towel. "Shih had to get your number from somewhere."

The disclosure seemed to collapse Rodriguez. Their Baron sat heavily back down upon his sad throne, all the anger draining out of him, _whoosh_ , just like that _—_ like the wind had come by and swept his ashes away.

"It's not like I've got details," she added, as if details will put spread ashes back together. "He didn't say anything to me. I told him you might be interested and sent him your way, that's all; it didn't seem like something you needed to be bothered with. Nobody knows. It's OK."

"No," Nines insisted. The vitriol was just a sulk now. He sounded oddly like a spurned little boy. He clung to what was familiar when someone threw a little newness onto what he thought he'd figured out. There was weight hanging over him, tangible and dense, making him look like who-knows-what. Damsel didn't have the words. "No, it is not OK. It is not OK for you to take calls from people like Nicky Shih without telling me about it. It is not OK for you to decide what I need to know. Making me friends is not your job."

"I'm sorry, all right?"

He didn't say anything else right away. The Baron scrubbed a hand over his frown. Some time passed.

"Nicky Shih is dead," Nines told her, like an afterthought. The color of his hair, hands, eyes looked washed out in the aftermath of anger.

Damsel didn't know what to think. She never really did anymore.

"You. You, uh. You didn't—"

He didn't answer. He just said: "We don't touch the rest of that money. It's insurance."

She crossed the room again, fear dwindling to concern, until Damsel was standing in front of him. Her red hair had stopped bleeding. It turned humid and dark. "Insurance for what?"

"Isaac," Nines said, nothing else.

It was rhetorical; she knew what he meant, but she didn't want to hear. "You seriously think Abrams is going to trade us in?"

"I'm not giving him the chance. That's why I made the deal with Shih in the first place. We've got to save our shots, look long. We'll take Hollywood if we have to, when all's said and done," the Baron promised _—_ and you couldn't tell, from how he scowled at nothing, whether the voice that said so was hoarse from stubbornness or anxiety. His frustration made him quick to roar and clam up outside the audience of others. He was looking vaguely downwards. He seemed smaller somehow. "After this."

Damsel almost took his hand. "Nines. Do you really think there's an after this?"

He closed his eyes. He did not yes or no.

She breathed out, a five-ton exhale, and plunked down on the foot of Luckee Star's bed. It let out a pathetic squeak. They sat like that, silently across from one another, for a while.

"Look, let's just…" It was the Den Mother who broke the truce. Her voice, surprisingly unarmed, normal, sounded like hope; her slouch looked like nerves; the anti-wrinkle spray on this quilt, something offensively peach, smelled like defeat. "Let's just go. We can figure out what to do next when we're somewhere out of range. But staying here isn't helping, and it's driving us both crazy. Let's go, OK?"

"Damsel. We leave, we don't come back. You understand?" She blinked hard, trying to stop the discolored carpet from spinning into nonsense. "I'm not ready to make my last stand. Because it's not over. Do you hear me? This is not over."

Most nights, Damsel went through life feeling like a harbor with no boats. She chased people who didn't need her; the ones who did never lasted long. She wanted somebody to need caring about.

"Yeah," she mumbled. "I hear you."

Then: "You think we could get our hands on a pass without her?"

Nines mulled this over. His head leant back against the shedding wall, messing up his hair. "I don't know. Probably not without killing somebody. Why?"

"Cause bitch is cracking under the pressure. Forget whether or not she's lying. She fucks up, Nines _—_ that Cam drops the ball _—_ and we're hanging out to dry. And you know, there is nothing forcing her to actually show us what's in there. Not that signing contracts with the devil means shit, anyway."

To Damsel's surprise, he agreed. "You're not wrong. I'll take it under consideration. But Woeburne seems to have a pretty good sense this maneuver is do-or-die for her. Whether that's true or not, I can't know, but she thinks it is. Now, I didn't like her tone tonight _—_ so after this, we're through. Time's fast coming where I'm going to put as much distance between me and the Seneschal as possible. But I think she's got one more in her."

"Maybe. But if she goes down in flames—"

"London's tough. Poor London," he said.

Damsel left the room, checked to see if her clothes were still wet, and was disappointed. She lingered as long as she could with that flimsy wooden door between herself and the Baron. She wrung out her hair, staining both palms cherry-red. She dipped them in the sink. She accidentally glanced at the mirror, forgetting not to, haunted again by pictures of how her face looked before. Better skin. Clearer eyes. Fuller cheeks. She used to get summer freckles that took months to wear off.

' _Fuck this,'_ Damsel thought, and opened the medicine cabinet so that glass wouldn't echo back anymore.

The Den Mother wrestled into her bra, snapping it on, not caring about the dampness. She pulled on her top and kicked into her pants. Dripping hair stained the cotton instantly. She stuffed it into a rubber-band. She chucked the towel and decided that, since he didn't care anyway, she might as well walk around looking rumpled and damp. She was too tired to do anything else.

Damsel scratched some paint off the wall, kicked the plastic trash bin over, and returned to the bedroom. She picked up her handgun and set it back down on an open corner of dresser. "Still think we ought to work around that Seneschal."

"I told you: I'll sleep on it."

"You don't think tomorrow's too late?" The Den Mother was yanking out drawers, checking for something else to wear. They were empty but for a pack of ziplocks and a decrepit Bible. One of the brass handles came off in her fingers; each tug let out a horrible, stressful yelp. "I'd ring up whoever you want for this bust right now. Only way to beat her to the punch."

"I'm not doing anything tonight. Way too soon to act. For now, we wait it out," Rodriguez told her, sitting wearily between the telephone and desk lamp. He'd pulled out a stack of city yellow pages and placed the heavy book next to him, but no sections had been dog-eared. He wasn't looking at her.

Damsel didn't give up. "You think Jeanette Voerman could do anything for us?"

"Drop it, Red."

"I mean, she's a psychopath. But she knows people. Bet Woeburne would change her tune real quick if we got a Nosferatu working under her plan. What about that Santa Monica SOB? Tung's his name, right?"

"I'm serious. Enough."

She didn't pout. She steamed. The Den Mother gave her pistol a hair-raising spin-the-bottle whirl against the furniture and ground it out: "Fine. Fucking wonderful. Well, I hope to hell you get another bitch to run this errand for you. Pardon me if I'm not rushing to bend over backwards for some sell-out Cammy cunt you aren't getting _—_ whatever the fuck was it you said? _—_ 'vibes' from."

Before she could take it back _—_ or make it worse _—_ Nines stood up, lunged across the room, and was ducking two inches in front of her face.

"I don't need to take this from you," he promised, upper lip twitching back over his canines. Damsel blinked. A large hand clapped down on her collarbone; his thumb and forefinger angrily framed her throat. His eyes were the width of knife edges.

It was reflex to turn _—_ to break away with a jerk of one shoulder _—_ but she couldn't move. His fingers were digging her clavicle. "We are in the middle of a potential crisis and you're telling me when and where to pick up snakes? You are going to sit your ass down on that bed, shut up, and calm yourself down _—_ or I swear, little girl, I will calm you down."

She wanted to swallow, but there was a catching, a blockage in the pipe; it wouldn't go down. Her ears felt cottoned. Her heart had boiled up to her throat.

"Get out of my face," she said.

"Then get off my fucking back. I'm bailing water with my fucking hands, here _—_ and what the fuck are you doing, Elizabeth? Where the fuck are you?"

Boiled heart tastes kind of like salt, it turns out _—_ stuck there at the back of your mouth, pushing against the flattest teeth. The words were like sentencing. Damsel said: "Let me go."

He grabbed her arms in his hands.

And then Damsel was somebody else _—_ somebody old, that is _—_ conjured up because it turns out, after all this faking, somebody else had remembered her name.

She hit him in the face. Hard. All the disappointment and anger bottled up _—_ not at the Brujah themselves, but for him _—_ for Nines Rodriguez, specifically _—_ for who he should have been, and who she got instead _—_ who they all _got instead—_ dropped out of that swollen organ bobbing in her gullet, yolky and red _—_ it broke down her arm, and felt like the bones were on fire. It slingshot around her wrist and into her fingers. And she didn't even feel the impact of the punch. He was simply close one moment, and the next, he was far. Nines was off his feet and _crack_ against the wall and thump-smack on the floor.

Then it was all draining _—_ the fire from her fist, the tightness in the veins. He lay there on the carpet for a minute to come-to. A few seconds, though, and Nines winced back up to his elbows, flatlined. He seemed confused, like his back hurt. The fingers came away wet from his broken lip and there was steady dripping from the Baron's nose.

There Damsel was: standing in front of the bed with her boiled heartskin burst open like a cabbage and her fist carrying his blood.

Nines stared at her like that for a second, looking oddly forlorn. Then he grimaced, wiped his nose on his arm, and got up _—_ thinner, somehow _—_ seeming like another stiff shove would sit him back down.

"Jesus. I didn't mean to _—_ not like _—_ not like that. Not like—"

"It's OK."

He didn't even sound like himself. He sounded like a ghost _—_ like he was sixteen years old and sober and too shy. He sniffed the blood back before it fell and fixed his shirt and didn't look at her. Damsel started forward to pick up a towel or something for his nose, but she was a fixture there now; she solidified. Her knees wouldn't bend and her arm, still thrumming with Potence, was two hundred pounds. "I wasn't trying to—"

"It happened. My fault. It's over."

She dropped onto the mattress. The springs creaked cheerlessly.

"I didn't mean to. Shit. I don't know what I was _—_ I didn't mean to do that. I don't mean to—"

"You did. You meant it," he told her _—_ not fighting about it, just upfront, no dressing, an absolute statement of truth. Nines eased himself to sit on the bed beside her, still grimacing, sore from colliding with the wall. They weren't all that close, but the weight shift and the shitty springs made it hard to keep separated, like leaves on the top of the water; he was too heavy for her to keep the balance. Their thighs rolled together, but nobody bothered moving. He looked shocked. Like realizing, out of the blue, that somebody dear to him had kicked it _—_ not grief, like yesterday _—_ but the shock of impermanence, when somebody died a long-long time ago. "I hope like hell somebody in this city does."

He looked scared, is what it was. She did not say sorry, and she did not try to take it back.

"I'd die for this. I would. I would have. For all this, and everybody. But not for you," she told the Baron's knee, not sorry but something like it. It was the realest thing she'd kept _—_ and she'd kept it way, way down _—_ way under Lily and K-Al and Skelter _—_ way under Jacquelyn _—_ way down where Beth waited in the basement until somebody needed her again. "I don't want to die for anyone."

He didn't say anything. Just nodded, one thousand and ten miles away, but Damsel knew he heard.

"Can I ask you something?" Nines didn't say no.

"Did you believe it?" she dared him, spikier than she could account for, but still, in some way, soft. "The Free-State. I know it's—"

Damsel found she couldn't finish; the thought ran into cotton and got soaked up. There were memories of iodine and egg dye and unessential blood. She scraped her tongue on the back of her teeth and swallowed the sour stuff there.

"But was there a time?"

The Baron didn't look at her. Or the man didn't, because that's all he was, if you took his act off him, like scraping the scales off a river fish. Beth had a book like that when she was a child. It was about a great big Chinese carp _—_ a koi or something, the kind that looks like a whiskered dragon. It was the only source of color in a grayscale lake. He'd been a terrible king, this fish _—_ so terrible that, eventually, he'd had his grand purples and victory reds and ink blues bloodily eaten off by minnows, one-after-the-other. When the last was pulled, a glossy gold thing, the king _—_ rendered to a sad gray shad _—_ sank. And when he finally touched the bottom, finless and unable to swim anymore, the book exploded color in celebration. The kid used to run her fingers over that final glittering illustration and think of doubloons at the bottom of a lake. It felt like old magic. Damsel could remember doing that, if she pushed herself into thinking and closed her eyes tight _—_ tight enough to see colors there were no names for dancing, like fishtails.

Nines didn't look at her. He seemed emaciated. Shaky, or transparent, except for the blood at his nose. He was like a burnt-out house. She would remember him that way, she knew, years then decades later: looking up, gray and expressionless, at sky from the bottom of a lake.

And no, he said. No, never. Not in the State.

But in something. In something. For a little while.

Then there was nothing else to say at all, ever. Somebody laughed loudly in an apartment outside, a deserted noise. She heard the dripping of the shower. Damsel sat there for a minute. Then, without understanding why, she patted his leg, and stood up.

"Nines," she said. "I'm going to go."

He didn't try to stop her.

Damsel wasn't sure what she wanted to tell him. Too many half-thoughts and unformed things. She wanted to scream at him for lying so badly, for not bothering to fool her better. She wanted to remind him, needlessly, that yes _—_ in a way, she had owed him, and when you owe someone like that, it determines everything you believe. She wanted to grumble that even if she left it was all right anyway because nobody had ever needed her except him. That it was all right because she loved that lie _—_ that picture book _—_ and even when she knew how it was going to end, Beth kept reading it over and over, just to watch the color catch fire, and to have evidence it was going to work out in the end.

But all that felt too much like goodbye, so Damsel didn't say anything. She picked up her things. She took the old gun. She left her green hat by the door.


	90. For SL

_For SL_

 

RISK ASSESSMENT

PERSONNEL SUMMARY  
LACROIX FOUNDATION

AUTHORED BY: JOELLE LEFEVRE  
ISSUE DATE: DECEMBER 10 2011  
NEXT ASSESSMENT: JANUARY 10 2012

**TG  
** Agent is ACTIVE.

 

**MRG  
** Agent is ACTIVE.

 

**BT  
** Agent is DORMANT.

**HSE  
** Agent is ACTIVE.

 

**SMB  
** Agent is ACTIVE.

**RD  
** Agent is ACTIVE.

 

**PN  
** Agent is ACTIVE.

 

**SW*  
** Agent is ACTIVE. 

 

_***SW - EXPANDED REPORT** _

_OPERATIONAL BRIEFING  
_ Agent is operating within expected parameters. Some route deviation has been observed over vehicle GPS for license plate 6JVL433; these readings remain in the metropolitan area and are not, as an isolated issue, cause for alarm.

Various other abnormalities are apparent. As suspected, Central Anarch contingent has implemented a watch order. It is unknown if this activity is related to agent’s cabinet promotion.  Agent has been notified and instructed Do Not Engage.

Postal rerouting and screening continues indefinitely (until cancelled by Offices of the Prince). Order initially implemented on 16/2/10 with no amendments to date. I am personally reading and sorting all outgoing writing from her current address.

As I made note of in my previous assessment, it is debatable whether or not and to what extent agent appreciates the details of her appointment. As of this writing, it is my opinion agent falsely suspects mid-level Camarilla internal involvement behind the Sabbat-orchestrated assassination attempt in April 2011. No special action has been taken to dissuade agent of potential suspicions at this time.

If agent is aware that the initial expectation of her instatement in Los Angeles was death-by-homicide is uncertain. In my opinion, it is unlikely. As an added precaution, I have purged all accounts from the Theory & Tactics Department relating to the orchestrated encounter on 13/2/10 (INTEREST POINT 26 – SUNNYSIDE CONDOS). Agent is obviously cognizant of her increased administrative relevance since promotion to the office of Seneschal, and is unquestionably aware of the potential function of her death as a political maneuver against the Anarch Party.

At this time, agent’s appreciation of the circumstances surrounding her instatement is unknown.

 

_EVAL  
_ Agent is QUESTIONABLE.  
_OPERATIONAL RISK ASSESSMENT (ORA) IMPACT_ – SIGNIFICANT.  
_LIKELIHOOD_ – MODERATE (RISING)

 

_LONG-TERM RISK MANAGEMENT  
_ Continued remote surveillance, at your behest. Actively mapping location data.

 

_SHORT-TERM RISK MANAGEMENT_  
Wiretap initiated via IMSI catching; valid dates: 11/12/11 – 1/1/12.  

 

_EDITORIAL NOTES:_

_* I (still) recommend revoking full clearance privileges, effective immediately._

_Agent will not be informed._


	91. La Vie en Rose

Joelle was dreadfully bored.

It made her sigh in her swivel-chair, inundated by the lazy monitor glow, one hand smoothing down slick caramel hair. A blue blast of pixels displayed Mr. LaCroix's December schedule, its well-kept grid informing her he still lacked several important appointments. She would have to call those in. When she typed as much—PENDING—the keys, which were never around long enough to get worn, went loud and stiff beneath her fingertips. Mouse clicks echoed inside the high-ceilinged lobby. It was quiet enough in Venture Tower to feel, always, like you were sleeping in a cold bed in an empty house.

Her white nails peppered over the black reception desk. She scraped the satin red witch-toe of her left shoe along a power cable just for something to do.

Mlle. Lefevre was not thrilled to be working so late into the night. It was not due to fatigue, naturally. This work rarely taxed her; Toreador have a finesse for smiling prettily when they'd rather spit, and watching is an easy pastime for a spy. But the subjects were still dreadfully dull. While Joelle realized that two whole 'dreadfullies' might seem melodramatic, how else could she put it? Streetlamps throbbed on the pavement outside. City busses whisked headlights across the tacky statues standing sentinel on either side of Mssr. LaCroix's main entrance. Looking at them irritated her. They were an unashamed awkwardness nestled against these aggressive lines of industrial architecture, looming out in the thoroughfare like very expensive garden gnomes. She felt bad for them, really. Sad, gaunt, weedy creatures. So misplaced. But then again, Ventrue do tend to directly equate 'taste' with 'price-tag.' Poor onyx guardsmen. Poor Mssr. LaCroix. A fortunate thing he had her eye on hand—not that the dear man ever truly made good use of it. Not in the way she was trained for. Not for many months.

Joelle bit her longest nail—not hard enough to break it, but only to bend. She would kill for a job! Anything must be better than this sitting, watching, waiting, under the pretense of filling out lines on a schedule for a man in an outmoded suit.

"Uh, Ms. Lefevre?" A fly was buzzing behind her. Penguin footsteps hammered the spotless tile. A hound's tongue sloppily butchered her name. As for Mlle. Lefevre, she did not glance away from the calendar. Disregard was the only way to avoid killing him. "Ms. Lefevre. Um—it's about time for me to punch out, real soon here. Gotta get heading home. Try to nab some sleep before the sun comes up, there."

No reaction. Her mouth, painted thick magenta, might have stiffened a bit.

Bernie pawed at his coat collar; imitation leather kept choking him, and the zipper pressed a red railroad into his neck. The badge was a dab of bronze on a cotton blue pocket. "Well, anyway. Yep. I'm strolling on out of here. Just so you know. You want me to walk you to your car, there, Ms. Lefevre?" ( _There_. Always with "there" and "yep" and "you know." Disgusting, perspiring riceball of a man. He was a ham-fisted racist without knowing it, and had asked her once whether she was "French-French" or "Caribbean-French." Once he had said, "It might be nice to have a permanent tan, there. You don't even need to get out in the sun." She could have picked up a letter opened and finish the job his jacket had started in ten seconds. He tried to escort her out every night; she never let him.)

Joelle flicked up one hand, all the worldly acknowledgement she ever gave this human. Her nail polish flittered and her eyes did not look. If this offended Officer Krantz, he made no mention. She held her cool, unwatching expression until he scuttled off to his drab and lonely corner. Someone should really see to a replacement. It would be humiliating for a visitor worth impressing to see him there.

And it was a mild relief when he left the premises. As always.

Disinterested with smitten hayseeds and her employer's weekly arrangements, Joelle lingered for another half-hour before buzzing in the daytime replacement and logging out of LaCroix Foundation Network.

She stood up, rolled her neck until it popped, and clacked into the floor-one ladies' room on pinched toes.

The bathrooms in Venture Tower were marlbed, dim, and glowing with orange sconelight. The wall lamps were shaped like seashells and provided only the bare, pretentious minimum. Three potted forest ferns were wilting along a far wall. The mirrors were massive and, in this small hour dark, blurred the edges of Mlle. Lefevre's cardinal-blush blazer. They needed a little perking. She leant over the cold counter, brushing aside a crumpled brown fern frond, and dotted carefully at her lashes. Mascara stung them. Water hummed in the pipes. The automatic faucet always flicked on when she got too close, hypersensitive to movement, whether or not she ever touched it.

It was cold, cold. Air conditioning hummed from the vents year-round, from early June to late December, because Sebastian LaCroix saw no reason to accommodate mortal bodies. This did not bother Joelle. Her legs were bare and immune to the dry, discomforting temperature. Her constitution was blasé.

A buzz rattled her handbag. Distracted, the Toreador plucked out a cellular phone and held it aloft, poking away icons. A fresh message from Ms. Woeburne held fort there, barely even complete, as though the Seneschal didn't have time to finish her words:

 

* * *

 

_**M. Strauss wants meeting w. SL Dec. 14th. Arrangements ASAP. –W** _

 

* * *

 

" _W_ " was getting rather too big for her britches, if you'd have asked Lefevre, and she did not appreciate this rank shift whatsoever. To think! Captain P. Jane had been raggedy, sarcastic and laughably anxious when she'd arrived, shuffling into this city as though half expecting it might slurp her gawky self up. But a few underhanded deals, nepotistic handshakes, and company presentations later, _poof_! How _official_ Sebastian's fledgling had become. She had grown progressively more insufferable since her promotion, dressing up and bolstering about like a real politician—and speaking like one, too, particularly to agents many years her better. It was almost too much to bear.

W! As if she owned the entire letter.

Joelle narrowed her eyes at the message, puckered, and directed the note to her To-Do List.

This was the most irritating portion of her job. Being presumed over and snubbed at by her lessers; being mistaken for the pretty pup of the house, silly and inconsequential, not likely to notice. Joelle noticed everything. It was only that Mlle. Lefevre, career noticer, had little interest in a Ventrue's sort of spotlight. She was not enthused by the prospect of parlaying with the Anrachs and Sabbat and Rancorous Whomever. She'd no insecure ambition to strut about, throwing dice in the inter-faction game Jyhad, giving herself nosebleeds over details and stomachaches from paranoid squabbling. Toreador energies are better spent elsewhere. But cheating never failed to upset Mlle. Lefevre—and S. Woeburne, dismal and dour and diligent and damning—was a cheat. She had cheated her way in and cheated her way up and, naturally, was cheating even now.

So sad. The thing about cheaters is that they never last very long—eventually, mid-cheat, with their hands full of stolen papers and the cookies half-eaten, they are always caught by someone like Joelle Lefevre.

She applied another coat of lipstick, strode past the idling security display one last time, and decided to leave.

It was three o'clock in a gusty Los Angeles morning. The daylight shift clerk should've already been on his way downstairs, a tedious ghoul who specialized in bureaucratic blockading and brought with him a very large German Sheppard wrapped in Kevlar. Joelle didn't care for the way that thing panted or the dead, dumb way it looked at her. But of course, safety is a number one priority for Ventrue—Monsieur LaCroix's safety, that is—and that's all you can say about that.

She set the monitors to standby, swiped her secretarial keycard through the registry scan, and then tucked it back inside her jacket breast, the neck chain at her collarbone like badly-shaven rhinestones. She stepped out the tower's front doors.

It was quiet and brisk on the street outside. Cabbies eked by on their way to the union coffee shop, spilling drunken club-hoppers and late-night corporates as they went. Joelle ignored them. She rounded the dreary bus stop, passed the ominous lampposts, and crossed into Venture's staff parking lot. Flood lights pushed aside the risk of darkness.

And she remembered, momentarily—not an apprehension; just an idle thought—how badly Ms. Woeburne attempted to look un-frazzled as the Seneschal explained her vehicle was no more. She remembered Mr. de Luca, enflamed before his time. She particularly remembered the way Sebastian had thrown his telephone across the penthouse and ordered her—in so many cool, unkind, resentful words—to have his Childe shuttled here in the first place, a temper-tantrum for competence in the middle of the night.

What a mess. What a mess!

Mlle. Lefevre swooped into her cabriolet—trademark, cinnamon red—slammed the door, and drove home.

It was still quiet when Joelle pulled her car into Skyeline's garage, a curt snort of the wheels and a harsh stop. It was quiet when she crossed the blacktop and walked inside—when she thought about feeding from the worthless-but-moderately-attractive policeman napping on the green lounge sofa, and when she brushed this idea off with a picky sigh. It was quiet in the horrid-looking elevator, her skin washed blinking blue. And, of course, it was quiet when the Toreador swished into her Floor Four suite, clapped on the lights, bypassed the hungry angelfish tank and looped her jacket onto a spare hanger. There was a list of messages waiting on the answering machine, but these, too, went untended. She sauntered into the bathroom straightaway. She didn't even bother stepping out of her ruby-red Kleins.

Bent over the sink, running warm water to dabble her face, Joelle saw she'd forgotten to hang up her pass card. It tumbled out, an ugly silver glint in the makeup mirror. It caught her eye.

As did the eyes that appeared in the glass behind her.

A mean expression. A grimace. Committed-to.

And Joelle winced, and she stiffened, and her head was between Nines Rodriguez's hands before she could get out any of the scream.

The chain did not pop. Her neck did. It was off her shoulders, brutal and clean, skull from cords with a firecracker sound and it thumped into the sculpted cream bathtub. Blood speckled the mirror the floor the wrinkled shower curtain the overhead shade blue coat black shoes large hands but the chain was clean and the chain remained intact.

The card dangled.

It landed on the tile. It found a new home in the Anarch's fist, and Nines Rodriguez was gone before she was.

White fire and weightlessness and Joelle Lefevre died watching her pretty herringbones melt until she could not notice anything anymore.


	92. Snakeskin

_Little poppies, little hell flames,_   
_Do you do no harm?_   
_– Plath_

* * *

 

Her allegiance was sitting on a seesaw, coming down.

Ms. Woeburne was standing on the alley sidewalk outside _Confession_ , arms wrapped tightly to ward off December, fingers punishing her jacket's leather sleeves. It was cold. There was bass and treble shaking through the windows and wrecking up her head. Brown curls gnarled in the winter wind, and when she breathed out—unthinking—there it was, white and wispy and so, so short-lived: her ghost.

Nine-thirty. It was 9:30 p.m. in Los Angeles, and she was the only one here.

"This is the fifth time I've called you," Ms. Woeburne said into her phone, too dismayed at this point to yell. She paced up the skinny byway, soles clacking concrete, distinct and aimless. Her guts echoed with the loss of an old conviction. Her insides twisted into pipe-cleaner knots. "I hope to you have a good reason. It goes without saying that we don't have much time. Nine-thirty-three. I can't push the shift change any farther than I already have. Your window is closing, and I will not be able to open it again."

She hung up. The car that drove past flashed sallow light up and down the Ventrue's dark, quiet eyes. Red strobe pulsed behind the stained church windows, pimpling the asphalt outside. She fingered the plastic keycard in her pants pocket. She swallowed. She wet her lips. She gripped at the laminated edges of an ID card laden with some staid Ventrue face that was not hers. Its name read Phillip Nelson; this meant little to her.

A quarter-past eight, when she'd last rang this number, Ms. Woeburne had shouted "Hurry the fuck up!" Now the Seneschal muttered only "Get yourself _here_ " and she closed her cell with a definitive click. It hit her pocket like cement. Her nerves were painfully, morbidly cold.

The battered truck that flicked its blinkers and turned at the intersection of West Ninth Street and Peoples Gas was not his. Tonight she had crossed the Rubicon. S. M. Woeburne was tiring of being a monster's corporal; she was prepared to be a monster of her own.

_Beep_.

"I'm starting to think either something has happened to you or you've had second thoughts," Ms. Woeburne said when she dialed again, fifteen minutes later. "If you are alive and you haven't abandoned this, contact me immediately. Tell me you're under the radar and can't make it. Tell me something. I can't wait. I will not wait on you."

And the dangling Seneschal—though her lungs felt full of muddy water—could not be terribly surprised. A calloused edge of her had long ago deduced that this is exactly what the Anarch Prince would do if you were ever in a position to need his offer of help.

Rodriguez was confident he had her pinned firmly between two walls, she was sure. Perhaps he was right. Her prior indiscretions—with Lily, Naim Carroll, then the Sabbat suppression, then—oh, god—Nicky Shih—had riddled Ms. Woeburne's résumé with flaws, and their paper-thin arrangements in Santa Monica constituted nothing but another glass wall in her fortress. One had to be both prudent and very cautious in determining what unlicensed activity would earn Sebastian's ire and what would solidify his respect for you. Like any other maneuver, this misstep had to be played carefully; it could not be permitted to multiply out of controllable parameters. She could not afford for strategically-placed cameras to look more like enemy abetting rather than agency monitoring. She could less afford for bribery of a Statesman to be interpreted as treasonous against the Domain or her progenitor. Forget the fine print—she couldn't afford another accusation, period—for it meant her removal from Mr. LaCroix's side, and there were no delusions about what, exactly, _removal_ meant.

She realized what the topographical map of her gambits in LA looked like. It _looked_ as though an overambitious young official had been secretly stacking her chips beneath their Prince's table—planting blackmail material in a sale to his competitors, orchestrating an attack on his career by those same competitors, and then baiting whoever was leftover to take the heat for her; after which, the mole would step out of the closet and into the mantle her ancestor left behind. Or, at least, it looked like she was waiting for him to fall. Would anyone believe her capable of that? A year ago, the notion was ridiculous; now, Ms. Woeburne was not sure. She was nobody with a record, but she _was_ the Childe of Sebastian LaCroix. LaCroix—it was a new name, a disrespected name, a name his peers and nemeses alike associated with _snake_. Arguing was useless. They could easily call her a snakelet. The Board was free to take whatever they wished out of context, spin it to look like treachery—against him, against the Camarilla, against their way of life.

What did it look like _in_ context?

They would say she was conniving and wicked and had manipulated the Party to serve her personal agenda with paychecks, false promises of power, usual Ventrue bargains. Or they would say she was criminally weak—that Rodriguez had blackmailed and intimidated her, made a Seneschal into a council puppet dumbly forwarding dissident gains to keep her head on her neck.

Either way, they would end her.

Ms. Woeburne was not positive she could outfox the wolf-Prince at his loyalty game, and withdrawing was not an option. But she would not lag into standby while he had the propensity to destroy her.

These shades of grey were nauseating. She would have given anything to see in black and white again.

One last call for her to say: I have no more time.

 

* * *

 

_**Send the footage and kill surveillance. Operation is DOA. I need everything now. –W** _

 

* * *

 

The text was off to Leonard with no further explanation. She could've felt like a user. But she really didn't have the time.

He was a little too convenient, her unlucky pawn. Nosferatu engineers are generally less-liked than Ventrue politicians, and while a Camarilla Board might suspect Gary Golden was pulling the neonate's strings, LA's pet Seneschal was not a top-five candidate. Cameras are cameras. Not much else to see here.

You might ask why she'd do this. Easier, maybe, to run; if she was going to be discarded, her local responsibilities ceased to matter; internationally speaking, the Kuei-jin were a worry for bigger sharks than she was. But _why_ is never really the question to ask. If you feel your motive more than you know it, then everything has probably been coming for a long, long time.

Early last night, Ms. Woeburne woke up, wanting answers, and put a card stamped with her number and her face into a locked warehouse door.

It failed.

When it failed, she tried another time, sure it was a fluke—that she had slid it the wrong way, tilted it infinitesimally, that there was a technical hiccup, that there were thumbprints on the bar. Then she tried another time—and another—and once more—a stream of tries—each with the climbing, bloody metal taste of dread pushing up at the back of her throat—a stream that sped up then stopped—the trapeze-fall into the tearless, dry-mouthed sobs you might make when a fantasy terror is suddenly close, suddenly real. Her wrists were shaking too badly to try the lock again.

You cannot not snap both your lifelines at once. You might as well take garden shears to the arteries attached to your heart.

Phillip Nelson's keycard sat impatiently in her jacket. She'd have to find something to melt it.

What matters more than _why_ is that you do have a card—everyone does—whether it's a physical card or a just an idea to represent who you are. And you will, do you know—it's inevitable—wind up pulling someone else's when it comes down to your own. Maybe not deliberately, depending on who you are—or, at least, not maliciously. But this is the way it is. Some players collect them, keep a wallet in their back pocket full of names and faces to throw indiscriminately when the pressure is on. Others are a little more particular about who they'll appoint to carry around. But specifics don't really factor.

What factors:

When you come across those sensitive files—one of those pre-markered envelopes, stamped with a logo beneath black pen—

—and you forget your place—

—and you ignore that everyone trusts you—

—and you pop the binding, and you reach in—

—and read—

—and you find, under the big, official, terrible words RISK ASSESSMENT, your own name, and under that a face—

—which you recognize, but only after a minute, because it's in black-and-white and looks like somebody else. Which you recognize, but not straightaway—

—because it looks like unimportance. It looks like one of the nameless faces on dossiers you have read dispassionately, the images of soldiers who are already dead and thus do not matter to you or anyone anymore. But it isn't, and you know this. You know, after a heartbeat or two, that it's your face—

—your own face—

—and, well. It's all the same game, then.

Ms. Woeburne stared at her watch, at the flip of a minute between 9:59 and 10:00. It passed, and it left her alone as she'd been all night.

She would have given anything. But giving requires something of value to lose.

 

**II.**

 

She had been on the ground floor too long. It was time to go up.

Ms. Woeburne cried—dryly, briefly—in the garage beneath Venture. It was not so much crying, though, as it was breath; the raggedy, dizzying gulps you take when you are trying not to forfeit your mind; a deliberate attempt to release mania; a physical dispersal of panic. She spent ten minutes in a dark parking spot, locked in her car, trying to swallow her rising heart. She thought about praying. She thought about Grandpa Omer with a bowl full of bright orange soup and a Christmas present for her. She thought about Madison with his cancer and his pet Pekingese. She thought about her mother asleep in a chair. She could not manage a couple of tears.

She turned off the ignition, and went to the top of the tower.

Sebastian was hollering as Seneschal LA strode numbly down his penthouse hall; she could hear him on the telephone. This reassured her only to a point. Here was evidence his anger was divided and unparticular; it allowed a small amount of hope that the _Tear Here_ dots hadn't quite finished drying across her throat. But Beckett's parting words hoisted thin hairs on the back of S.W.'s neck: _be cautious._ She was.

Something pounded deep as she reached for that doorknob. It felt like her heart, and it tasted like fear.

_'If you want to survive,'_ instinct warned, crisp and cool when she was not. _'You'll do it, pup.'_

You're right, she said.

I will.

"What do you _want_?" Mr. LaCroix growled from inside when her curt knock peppered quietly. "Don't talk to me through the bloody door. What is wrong with you people? Come in!"

Ms. Woeburne squared all her circles and entered.

"Do YOU know about this?" Sebastian demanded the moment she appeared, phone clutched in one hand, standing flustered behind his desk and scowling as though S.W. there in the doorway could possibly know what he meant or have an answer.

She did the one thing available.

"I need to speak with you." Ms. Woeburne heard her voice, thin and precise and bitter and toneless. "Tonight. Right—right now," it said, and it was.

Do you know those moments: when you can feel the trapped ghost rolling, like a dead planet, inside the shell of your leftover skin.

"You had better have a reason," he threatened.

All she had was: _Something significant has changed._

Prince LaCroix, bothered by juggling two inept conversations at once, barked "Just deal with it!" into the receiver and hung up. His eyes were tumultuous and clear—a whale eye, surfacing above the black water one second before it determines the fate of your vessel and disappears.

"I hate this city. I hate this country," he bristled, slammed the phone onto his desk, and that large oil-blue eye swept towards that towering black window. A yellow moon trawled pale and indifferent down the sides of skyscrapers. "Sand," he said. "Dust. Concrete. No history. I inherit disorder. I inherit the desert."

If Sebastian suspected Ms. Woeburne was guilty of half the things she'd done over this past year-and-more, he'd have killed her one toe past his door. He would not be able to tolerate it. His skill at pretense was sharp, but his patience was too short for such an elaborate charade.

She hoped so. You know you are in trouble when I-hope is all you have to say.

"What's happened?" S.W. tried, feigning as much ignorance as she dared. The world felt dull. It was instinct hit with a whetstone. She blinked sedately, unresponsively. "Tell me what's been done. I'll do what I can."

"Do you know that Joelle is gone?" the Prince shouted.

Gravity dropped out from under her. Tell yourself what you like about stable footing. There are always a few lower levels below Ground.

For a series of heartbeats she could think of this line and this line only:

_Agent will not be informed._

_Agent will not be informed._

_Agent will not be informed._

"Sometimes I think razing the whole outfit and starting over would be more practical," Sebastian snapped, flopping into his chair. He sunk down like a brooding boy-king. "On top of everything else—everything infinitely more important—I find out that the public enemy is targeting ancient data, of all things. I will not be made a fool of," he spat, slouched, gripping his arm rests as though they made a throne. "We do not wait."

Data—Sebastian said _data_ —and yet. Yet her skull was still here, firmly attached to her neck. Her blood swirled inside choked veins. Her face was blanker than empty space. There was no time to hiss _treachery,_ no time to stick her thumbs in both eyes and shove deep into the sockets because ' _Oh my God, he did it_ — _he did it anyway!_ — _and I am finished, and this is over, and how_ _could I be so fucking stupid…!'_

There was no time for any of that—because for all of it, she was still standing. She had not yet fallen down.

He doesn't know. He can't know.

The tin soldier swallowed. It felt like she'd just gulped a rock down the too-tight snakeskin of her jaw.

"Gone where?" Ms. Woeburne asked, though the question seemed like it came from outside. "Where would she go?"

"I don't know." LaCroix swept a hand. Joelle's whereabouts were a trifling matter in his desert; it was her removal, so easily done, that irritated him. Waste of resources. Who, then, Ms. Woeburne wondered, would abbreviate _JL_ on her file now? "I can't imagine where that woman might actually have to go. Someone has probably killed her."

It was moving too quickly. Altogether too quickly, pup. She looked at him, the temperature within her mind and throat like ice. Her hands did not shake. Her voice was stanchly clear. It sounded honest.

The Anarchs, she said, are going to take Santa Monica.

She did not have eyewitness corroboration, no. No, she did not have Therese Voerman's sanction to investigate. But she had tape, sir. A lot of it. She had a bad feeling. She had a hunch. It was her responsibility.

"They were YOUR responsibility," Prince Los Angeles snarled before she could finish it, teeth dangerously bleached and clean when he spoke, confirming everything his Childe knew he would forget and hold against her. Ms. Woeburne quailed under the harshness and the suddenness. It felt like sitting in Sebastian's car, holding his slap-burn on her cheek. It felt like an ungrowing. She fought with the immediate fear and leveled it quickly, like you use chemicals to burn out a weed. Her brain had forgotten how to feel disappointment. It was a different organ that processed her fear now. Perhaps it was the bones.

"I know. I know that, sir. I've been monitoring them, and." The words came out smooth and stable enough to make her balk. It was supposed to be difficult. Lying to your father, she means. But she sounded—more than anything else—like her boring, mediocre, unremarkable self. "I suspected for a long time. Firstly that Rodriguez was coordinating with Jeanette Voerman, positioning for an internal takeover—though I couldn't prove it. Not without a visual. And I got it. I mapped their movements. I have data ready tonight."

It was a little like bones, too, she imagined—the foretaste of what she was about to do.

She could hate Nines Rodriguez for the knife between her shoulder blades, and she could hate him for the one between her finger bones, and she could hate him the most for what he said to her when he was being honest. But she would not think herself his better any more.

She handed him the photograph.

Baron LA left a dark, quiet warehouse; he reached for the door of his car.

"I have it on film, Mr. LaCroix. That and more. I can get it for you tonight, if you'll only give me the time. If you'll just. All I need is time."

More time, she begged.

As it turns out: yourself is what you sound like, standing in a suit jacket, pleading for your life.

A little more time.

"Let Therese Voerman deal with her sister," Sebastian told her. "I want everything you have."

Ms. Woeburne looked at him with disaster averted and her hands frozen solid and her mouth full of desert sand and a tongue, sharp with knowing, with the material premonition a man was going to die because of what it had said.

This is what it meant to be Ventrue.

"We'll file it for evidence, and hand it to the Board. They can untangle this mess. _You_ can. I will not wait any longer for some doddering historians and spineless bureaucrats and craven wizards to tell me when I may secure my city. I won't be distracted," the Prince declared, focused in a way she rarely saw, fingers steepled together over the desk, over the picture where it lay face-up, casting a shadow across the pixilated image of Nines Rodriguez trying to make something dangerous disappear.

"The sarcophagus," she remembered, not sure why it occurred to her, stomach thrust up somewhere in the vicinity of her lungs. "Are you talking about the Ankaran Sarcophagus?"

The Prince nodded; _that is all_. "This is my priority. Everything else—for tonight—is yours."

"What about Beckett?" It was the only thing she could say to avoid turning his hatchet toward herself.

"Beckett," Mr. LaCroix snorted, slapping both palms flat across his desk top. The sound startled her. She jumped. "Oh, believe me. I have tried to separate us from this crippling need for _Beckett_. But it seems not all things are as simple as acquiring an advisor. Beckett was stringing us along," Sebastian said—a wild, mean bark. He threw both hands into the air, exasperated, where they fired out before folding angrily behind his head. "Concealing his research from us all this time. Who knows why? Who knows what tricks that charlatan was plying? This Domain is not a game," he swore. "I will not abide fiddling with my enterprise—not by anyone. Certainly not him."

"But I—we went through—through all that trouble. For him. So he would be here. To advise us. On this."

He paused. He stared at her.

"Do you know where Beckett is?" the Prince asked, low and cajoling, an unpleasant stroke along her innermost rib. Ms. Woeburne thought perhaps she had been Dominated.

She didn't know. She said as much. There was nothing else to.

LaCroix pursed. "Shame," he sighed, stabbed the intercom, and delivered a responsibility to a front desk manager S.W. no longer recognized. "Find Beckett and bring him back here. I don't care how."

This was how it happened, then. Ms. Woeburne waited to be told how much time she was going to have.

"Seneschal."

"Sir?" Her response was instant— _speak, spaniel_! Sebastian closed his eyes.

"Contact the Primogen," he commanded, and beyond all she feared of internal plots and Kuei-jin diplomacy and Anarch schemes, the old way he ordered her about was a comfort. She was not proud—she could not muster it. She was grateful. She was. "Tell them to assemble in the theatre immediately and then head there straightaway. Be swift and courteous. You will deliver a message directly from my office."

She toed near the edges of war crime; her card didn't work; her meter was running; her face was locked out. But she was alive. _She was alive!_

She was not going to die.

Not tonight.

"Very well. What will I tell them?"

The Prince struck his fingertips across the polished wood. The soldier felt their impact even as she stepped back, found her place on the track, and turned around. "Announce a Hunt. Effective tonight."

She said: I will.

This is the kind of snake she is.

"Ms. Woeburne," he told her.

Don't wait.

She didn't.


	93. Making It

Jeanette found this whole partisan thing tiresome.

Oh, she had good reason to be mighty annoyed with the Camarilla, Voerman Junior supposed, flopped crossways across her heart-shaped bed with golden pigtails dangling.

There was the nasty way the new company head-honcho cut short their expansion, for one.

Numero dos, the ugly spat with LA's old Top Kick—no offense to Ninesy (not too much, anyway) —had hobbled her once-hopping town into some kind of sad, bad Wild Bill Hickok show. All empty beachheads and empty cartridges and blank, burned grass.

Three: Those sourpuss Ventrue hadn't exactly painted flattering portraits of Santa Monica since Sebastian Boyface LaCroix rolled up in his big-black hetman limousine, either.

And—if a Count Four bummer wasn't enough cause to stick out the pinkest part of your tongue and mope—there was the simple fact that Therese thought paying these Camarilla cronies lip-service was so _very_ important. Always hustling off to Nocturne Theatre, sharking around at business functions, praising every pretty word that fell out of their new Prince's pretty mouth. It all made Sissy _unbearable_.

But you know what? All that, and anything Madame Chastity deems important is still fair game for Jeanette.

She tangled a finger into the telephone cord, wiggled her toes against the pillowcase, and said _"hmmm."_

Matter-of-fact, Ninesy must have interpreted some meanness from that sentiment, because he chuffed over the phone. Winding up your phonebill on midnight chats with Anarch warlords was probably not the cleverest thing to do, but she could appreciate a desperate situation. She knew what it felt like to feel like a starved tiger in a roadside zoo—stripes behind chicken wire, teeth in your paw.

"— _do not have time to let you over-think this,"_ the Baron said. The potholes on the street broke him up.

Jeanette huffed and dangled her head farther over the mattress edge, one arm slung along with, until her knuckles teased the ground. This hideous borrowed camisole Therese made her put on was itching fierce. It smelled wicked, too—like Sissy's hairspray and mothballs. God forbid she update her closet to something even remotely tip-toeing past 1984. But she tucked it into the pencil skirt, dress of defeat, and rolled her surly eyes. "Tempting as some encrypted Ventrue files sound, I can't really wile away the hours letting you chat me up tonight, Baron. You're not the only one with a lot on his plate. There's some stupid Kindred to-do downtown in an hour and Queen Victoria is making me go—seems like a big emergency."

" _I can fucking imagine so,"_ Nines spat, aggression jumping, anxieties tangled up with this little Camarilla red-alert. Truck tires loudly smeared tread marks across a stretch of Santa Monican street. Frustration made his words widely-spaced and clear. " _If I_ _had_ _other resources, I'd use them. But if you have not noticed, I am somewhat in a bind right now. I need feedback on this and I need it fast. Thirty minutes—max. Shit. I may not even have that. So if you can't do this, save me time and just hang up the fucking telephone."_

"I still have to fix my hair. Can't you get Gary Golden to look into it, or something?" She flipped over, landing on bare feet, hoisting up and stretching her back cheerleader-style. Vertebrae cracked. "Or are you and Hollywood having a tiff?"

" _Nobody else,"_ Rodriguez barked, ignoring the obvious attempt at nettling him. Zero fun, these gun-smoke revolutionaries. _The Asylum_ 's hostess trotted to her vanity and thumped down beside it, knees touching, feet turned inwards. It was a juvenile posture. She pulled on some ankle socks—something Sissy wouldn't notice strapped away in posh little booties, a little tee-hee all to herself. _"I'd have put in a call to Gary, but no one's heard from his people since the Sabbat raids kicked into overtime out there. Probably bugged underground. Unless_ you _know where he is…?"_

She shook her head, pulling both pigtails out of it. "Negative, Ninesy. Gare-Bear is not exactly my biggest fan."

" _Well, that is just fucking wonderful. Glad we wasted ten minutes on this shit,"_ he cussed, just in case Jeanette hadn't gotten the hint before.

"Language? You're speaking to a l—"

" _Don't think this blood's not going to splatter on you,"_ the Brujah threatened, biting back panic. Predictable. Flash that stoic, stonewall face right back at them, and they'd resort to bully-tactics and intimidation. Nice from a distance, but bargaining with one up-close made a girl think better of her old-fashioned tough-guy dreams. _"Don't think for a second that if I go down for this, your sister won't pull her own sidewalk up looking for evidence you had a hand in it. I have a vested interest in Santa Monica. If you can help me, you better fucking do it."_

Her hairbrush stung the whole way through, struggling to discipline the matted and wild, the danced-out. She ripped strands—gold fishing wire. "Oh, I don't doubt it, cowboy. No need to convince me; you know I love giving a leg up to my poor Anarch brethren. Charity becomes me. But right now's a bit inconvenient. The more I deal to you, the worse it looks for me, so anything that crosses between us is going to have to be strictly on the down-low—and more so than usual." A burning scent rose up in the sisters' room, steam flushing from Jeanette's straightening iron. Split-ends singed between hot metal. "You're dying to see me, I can tell, but I just can't meet you tonight. Therese has been putting chinks in my choke chain. Already grilled me once this week, and just yesterday, I caught that evil little busy-body snooping around my e-mail."

" _Fuck,"_ he swore again—this time, because there was nothing else to do—a fire at his back and front tires picking up speed towards LaCroix's garrote. _"Son-of-a-bitch."_

Miss Voerman heaved a sigh.

Nines Rodriguez was in more than a bit of trouble; she could infer fear from his voice. Such a sad, sad story. Too bad, really. It might've behooved her to assist (given old Ninesy still stood a shot in the dark at taking back his Free-State throne); still, she hadn't been lying to him. She had both hands in cascades of hair, winding it down, scrubbing off foundation with rough movements that felt progressively less like her. Therese would be here soon, and then there'd be no helping anybody, at all.

' _Hurry up—don't let her in!'_ Jeanette sucked her bottom lip, tasting stick, blue eye wide and reddening in the foggy mirror. With the other, she watched their little black door behind her in old glass. _'She'll listen!'_

"Oh, I just hate to see you in such a bind, new friend. So I'll get Bertie on it. He's a whiz at that sort of thing." Ice-pop fingers were creeping up the thatches of her spine. She fought against a sudden urge to pencil her eyebrows thick and dark. "Now, if that's all, I better skedaddle…"

But the Has-Been Baron wasn't game. _"Bertram Tung? No way. Not on this. He fixed us up last time, but last time was a different ballgame, and that bastard's still Cam,"_ Nines whuffed. It shouldn't have surprised her; Anarchs never were sensible enough to accept favors at face-value. Jeanette fidgeted against the stool. She slid both feet into a pair of closed-toes. They felt constricting, pinching her pinkies, heels too serious to run in.

"Bertram? Pfft," she snorted, finally picking up the eyeliner. Large mascara stains beneath her swollen lids had been rubbed raw with washcloth strokes; they burnt. Her lips were stripped and ash-pale. They needed a new shade: How About Black. It was hard not reaching for the conservative vial, so she stuffed a disobedient hand under her bum and sat on it. What was that noise scraping at the door, kitten? Pump footsteps and an elevator _bing!_ ; she must've have heard them, pores sparking along both arms and down her sides. The little girl in her waited, frozen, until she knew it was only imagination playing naughty. "Bertram's whatever the highest bidder wants him to be, and while I can't buy out His Majesty the Prince, my payments are sooner and sweeter. He'll do it, because I'll ask him to."

" _Jesus Christ,_ ' Rodriguez grumbled, because he had a headache and no other options but to trust the mad hornet who'd landed in his web. _"I can't rely on that, Jeanette. You're asking me to chance this whole game on you batting your eyelashes at a Nosferatu; I can't—"_

"The way I see it: you don't have much choice, sweet thing."

" _Christ,"_ he said again—this time, it sounded weak. " _Look. I don't have time to argue with you about this. I am at the end of my rope, so you better as hell be sure. There a plan that goes with this little scheme?—because I'm going to be outside your door in ten minutes. Tell me where else to go, I'm coming straight up; I don't give a shit if the bitch does see me."_

"That wouldn't be very smart, Nines, honey. Especially not when I'm about to save your neck. Listen close, compadre. You know where the sewage lines open up—that access gate just outside _Brothers' Salvage_?" A silence suggested he did, or that the Anarch could find it on his own. Jeanette rolled her eyes. Oh, that winning machismo. "It's right by this old rotting silo. The lock's never latched. Go down there, fork a left; there'll be this old maintenance storage space cleared-out. It's a bit of an office space for him these days. Inside that room, there's a steel cabinet on the far wall, just next to this old-school pressure meter. Put whatever you've got in there and Bertie'll be over to pick it up within the hour. You got all that?"

" _I don't have an hour."_

"Aren't you bossy for a dead man! I'll tell him it's as urgent as urgent can be." A vague, triangular space behind Voerman's forehead was beginning to sear. She felt like she might drill through an inch of skull and scratch brains to shush whatever that pressure was, if only it wouldn't kill her. A funny firecracker taste spread from her sinus passages to her tongue, zinging along the buds. It made Jeanette's throat feel too wide, as though her vocal cords were chained to free weights, a zamboni hitting her pitch. That was enough talking for now. She flipped open her laptop. Makeup canisters scattered about. "Better hurry. And don't worry about returns. He'll get into your inbox faster than it'd take for you to write out the address."

" _It'll be there. Make sure he comes through and stays quiet. If this falls into someone else's hands, Jeanette, our heads are rolling."_

"Of course, sweetheart. You don't have to tell me twice." A pop of her mouth sealed the dark lipstick. A blonde fringe tucked neatly into its clip. A brief pang as the contact lens dropped over her mist-green eye, chased by saline solution, artificial coolness that ran over a cheek and dribbled on the countertop. She wiped it off with two digits, her others busy typing. "But I do, naturally, expect a little something from my Brujah business-partner in return."

" _Get this done right,"_ Nines swore, punching in the accelerator, _"and I'll give you anything you want."_

Jeanette harrumphed. "Don't start making promises you can't keep, sunshine. Just keep my name out of your interrogations, yeah? I don't want any rain on my half of this freedom parade."

She finished typing and hit send.

 

* * *

 

**TO: BERTRAM TUNG**   
**FROM: JEANETTE VOERMAN**   
**DATE: DECEMBER 12 2011 10:46 PM**   
**SUBJECT: open immediately, kitten!**

 

Dear Bertie,

Hi babycakes! I have a teensy favor to ask you. Seems Nines Rodriguez is in hot water with you-know-who and needs the kind of help only a good nossie can provide. Sending him over to your drop with some very sensitive and very encrypted information. if you can go ahead and work your magic on it then send the stuff right on back, that'd be just too gentlemanly of you. ASAP plz! & no sell outs. Him and me are making friends lately so play nice.

p.s. Sorry for sending you so many Brujah night-in-and-night-out. But this could turn out VERY well for you in the long run if things go well for him, which means things also go well for me, sugarplum. For now I will thank you with lots of luv and in the usual way. ;) Also picked up some juicy gossip about the mafiosos you will flip over! will tell you all about it after this itsy-bitsy job's taken care of.

Thank you peaches!

* Jeanette *

 

* * *

 

"You there, tiger?" He'd said nothing, but Voerman could still hear blacktop rumbling away, wind ripping against a cracked car window. She could hear it wasn't over just yet. "Because I don't know about you, being so quiet, but this all sounds like a done-deal to me."

The Brujah's affirmative grunt wasn't as eager as she'd hoped, but it'd have to do.

Her guts squiggled.

She knew what that meant.

"Sissy's here. I have to go now. _Vaya con dios_ , Ninesy," Miss Voerman said, head cocking, butchering it, and then he and she were done. "Ciao!"

Jeanette clicked the mouse, closed her computer, and hung up the telephone.

Therese was left holding the dial-tone, confused.

 

**II.**

 

Something was down here with him.

Nines Rodriguez was an old Anarch. He wore that title with as much dignity and severity as a not-that-old monster can. But that title—and this city—was a death warrant with a crown made of iron and bone. The spikes stuck to your skull and the gemstones anchored down. _Baron_ drank your blood. You could not take it off once you put it on.

If the role strain didn't kill you, the corporate flunkies sure would. They didn't have any other choice. Only way to get that crown off is to shoot the head inside it.

Nines could not tell, sometimes, if he was an old Anarch or a young monster. But he absolutely did know this situation was fucked long before his truck screeched to a short stop outside _Brothers Salvage_. The Baron's heart was jammed up somewhere in his throat, shoulders tight, teeth hurting. One dead Cam lying ashed in her apartment. One Landa warehouse with the electricity flashed out and cabinets torn apart. One armful of LaCroix Foundation folders sprawling on his passenger seat, a jumbled mess of raw data, numbers that didn't compute. One Seneschal stabbed and dumped. One last good kid down.

" _You keep your priorities in mind. You got to see beyond tomorrow. You stop getting yourself shot in these fucking block raids—live to fight another day,"_ MacNeil said, the first and only time Rodriguez spoke to him, right before LA-of-Then imploded. He was only a little better than newbie himself in the 60s, and didn't know what to make of that advice. Now? Decade or two later, when their last icon disappeared, he'd been one among few who could even consider filling those shoes: Brujah, semi-established, no dependants, big talker, and a stone's throw older than greenhorn. But he'd learned the game a long time before that card was thrown.

Because before that there was Chelle, standing back to watch another one of her chopper squads riddled into mincemeat. She'd shrug and pat her newest ghoul on the back as he heaved behind a dumpster. _"You got to buck up and shake this thing off, doll-face. We lost a few good boys tonight, and it's a crying shame—hell, I even liked Chester. But minute-men come easy. Blows my fuckin' mind how much so, to be honest,"_ she'd noted, rubbing his sore ribcage, dealing him a thump to the spine that made the retching worse. Tommy laughed his ass off from the car. There was a splatter of hot blood on hood paint that must've been Lou's; it steamed under moonlight, life on fire, bad smoke. _"You'll always have the soldiers so long as you act like you're worth dyin' for. All you gotta do is act it. Here, honey—take this hankie—wipe your mouth. You just keep that smile on your face and you'll get the bad kids to back it up."_

Christie, Deacon, and all the San Fran discontents they could stir up bussing to Los Angeles in hours. Rochelle was right. Dark hair and pretty teeth are all you need. The rules stick.

It was gloomy in the sewers beneath Santa Monica, and _Christ_ , it stank. Nines had parked messily outside that silo, then rounded it with pistols at his sides and smuggled evidence pinned under one arm. A smoky night waited above. Oil and antifreeze made the air above _Brothers Salvage_ unpleasant; it was a maze of automotive rot, broken windshields, glinty threats and chain-link fences Rodriguez hopped over. He took them at a jog, wanting to run but too nervous to admit this was an emergency. Not yet. Almost. But not right now. Flat-faced junkyard dogs barked at him from their pen. He barely wasted the time to glance around. If Therese Voerman had been waiting outside that wrecking field with a taser, a gas can and a lighter, the Anarch wouldn't have seen her until his backbone stiffened and his clothes caught fire. _'Bad death. Real bad death.'_

He found the access gate easily enough: it was a cement hump forking out of dry gravel, surrounded by pipes and water gauges. Door was barred. His pulse surged when both hands fixed themselves around the beams. Nines could've hauled this flimsy thing off its hinges easy enough, but locked doors to drop-off zones tended to be bad signs. Except he tried, and the bar swung off. It was unlocked. Jeanette had come through.

He pushed it open, paint crumbling off in his palms, and descended at a fast clip.

Something was down here with him. He knew it intuitively—before he saw a single glistening eye.

Beyond the bonfire of a hundred plans unraveling, one thing was clear: That fatcat Toreador could not/would not buy Rodriguez's ass out of jeopardy this time. The only thing that might preserve him was intelligence, and Hollywood couldn't provide that—not since their Nosferatu contacts had run underground, rat-sucking cowards. Nines didn't trust Bertram Tung, who'd been known to serve Camarilla clients before (even, some said, against his clan's wishes). But there were no other options now. He'd have to do the fucking job.

The only other person left to approach might've been… well, London—but _shit_. London was probably on an express ticket to execution right about now.

She had every right, rhyme, and reason to take him down, poor bitch. Nines had flipped open her passport photo two years ago and saw S. Woeburne as either of two categories: a possibility, or a problem. He had not expected to take this long to decide. But London bounced back—that's what she did. You chuck her at a wall, she'd find a way to ricochet. You scowled at her and she scowled back. Good musketeer or slippery eel depending on who you were and when. Any way you sliced it, her death was an inevitability—and she knew it, too, he thought—maybe for a little while, but maybe for a long while. Might as well die-due-to-Anarch than her son-of-a-bitch Sire's takeover bid. He thought she deserved a better death than being blotted off LaCroix's employee charter one day because she outlived her usefulness.

Didn't feel right, though—that excuse. There was this nasty feeling that it's what the Prince had intended for her all along—death-by-dissident. And there was this other, heavier, ghostlike feeling that inevitability had nothing to do with it; he was full of bullshit, too.

There'd been some mail in Lefevre's place. He'd grabbed everything she'd been carrying—everything that looked like it could maybe be important. Most of it wasn't. But some of it was.

And then, some of it was and it wasn't.

He had a stack full of Woeburne's mail.

They must've been screening it before passing the post along to her. And of-fucking-course they were. Nines hadn't known what he'd had until he spied a return address crunched in his fistful of letters. He spilled them into the truck on top of the Landa cache. He pulled some pieces out.

Bills, forms, papers. And a postcard. Red lighthouse, blue water. Big balloon letters: HELLO FROM PORTLAND.

He flipped it over. There was nothing written—no text, no return. Just a scribble that said:

 

* * *

 

**I made it.**

 

* * *

 

He realized then that she was never going to see this. And just like that it feels like something important is gone.

One thing nobody has anymore is time. And there had been so much of it—time—spent worrying about London fucking something over or dropping an death order or pulling some real snakey shit. And maybe, he recognized in that moment, holding this shitty postcard, all those times worrying for London—how she'd get herself killed or char broiled or she'd piss someone maleficent off or blow up in a car. It was always for selfish reasons, and it was never enough to make him help her out. Not really; not for good; not that he could have. But there is a certain kind of honest you are with that sort of enemy—the kind when the other snake knows what you are, in ways you could never tell anybody, never put into words. London never wanted anything to do with his strenuous liberty line. Nines had to wonder if she would go out begging or as stiff-lipped and resentful as the Ventrue had always been before. Nines thought maybe he would remember London's face a little longer than the norm.

Shit, the Baron said, because the truth is that she couldn't help it; she couldn't help this or be anything else.

Impromptu meetings in Nocturne Theatre could mean a metric fuckton of unfortunate things, Nines knew. But the first dot on LaCroix's schedule was probably watching a sword hit the base of Woeburne's neck. And if she went out using Nicky Shih's name as a curse—which, let's be real: she was probably going to do—Rodriguez's mug would be the next to fly.

Not like there was anyone left ahead of him.

He rolled down the window and let the red lighthouse go.

Time to work fast.

His immediate plans were simple: Get this information sorted out, then high-tail it to Hollywood, where flamboyant Toreador debauchery made it possible for a lone Brujah to hide. Isaac could not bail Nines Rodriguez, but he could hide him. At the very least, with a big enough trade—and here's hoping London wasn't wrong about this shit—he could offer a dark basement while the old Baron figured this shit out.

The water was icy down here. That surprised him. It reeked of fish and sulfur and beach salt, aqueduct runoff from the shore, algae scumming up concrete walls. Thick pipes and electrical cords cased in rubber wrapped around every ceiling corner. Couldn't hear for shit. Massive purifiers churned; cylinders, tubing, and bacteria tanks turned rainwater into liquid fit for kitchen sinks. Nines pressed quickly in the direction Jeanette had pointed him. His boot soles squeaked against damp cement. A sodden raccoon huddled in one corner, gnawing on what looked to be something's fleshy toe, glaring coolly at the intruder. It chattered. Cat bones littered the flood valves, stored for future meals. Rats skittered. Wouldn't shock him to hop off this nice sidewalk and land on a motherfucking alligator; Rodriguez stuck to the paved walkway, extremely aware of the weight of each gun he had. Bad feelings. Not a good omen, at all.

Granted, it was pretty fucking difficult to have good feelings about slogging through city sewers with a motherlode of Ventrue blackmail stuffed under one arm.

Tung's "office"—if you could call this claustrophobic, spider-eaten sack-of-dirt chamber that—was neon green for all the LED lights and the weed growth sutured to the bricks. The disgusted Brujah had to cover his mouth with a sleeve. Vegetation mixed with animal decay, all chased by this strange cinderblock smell. It was like someone grabbed an electric fence with one hand while clutching peat moss in the other. Would've made him gag, had he still operated on fresh oxygen. At least the chances of someone else willingly poking around down here—say, one of those jackass "urban spelunkers" who occasionally stumbled upon Kindred business—were next to nil. Landa's documents might just live out the night.

He spotted Bertram's wall cabinet, oddly clean in all this miscellaneous funk, and shoved the folders in. The compartment was full of dust and shut with a creak. Nines didn't like just walking away; he wedged a stray stick through the handles, just to make sure rusted hinges stayed shut.

It was not relief the Anarch felt. He felt disquiet. Some weight was down here, hulking behind him, an ominous thing Rodriguez sensed but couldn't see.

It had been dogging him all night. Longer than that—all year—all the time—since he had woken up dead on a floor with a split in his lip and new blood in his heart. Chelle always said there was no outrunning that weight in the end—she said time will get you, no matter how smart or how strong or how tough or how smooth you could be. She said you will run out of time. One night, under one moon, you are going to take a wrong turn on a dark country road.

And the black dog is coming for you.

The Baron heard LaCroix's Sheriff before he saw him and leapt backwards, pawing air for momentum, breath and sense and heart and fortitude all ripped from his mouth in a strangled shout. It is something like a shout, anyway. Nines screams, eyes wide, a horrible gunmetal blue. He cannot process it. He does not think Blood Hunt. His body only reacts. There is a massive clawed fist scratching through this darkness, grabbing for the Anarch's face, fingers clenching so close that Rodriguez can feel the cold breeze of it _missing_ against his short beard. He falls away from them. Potence is winging up both arms, knotting the muscles; when the Brujah hits concrete, he barely notices. He lands on an elbow and rolls, jacket rippling, a colossal stomp splintering the ground where his chest had just been.

In hindsight: should have probably ditched the truck.

Nines Rodriguez is not everything his reputation promises. Even Barons who rely on ideas and words don't think about the aftermath of a fight stuck in the middle of one. There is no time to mull over the politics. Truthfully, Rodriguez doesn't fully realize the creature sent to destroy him; he cannot peer into that glazed red squint, cringe at the leathery façade, and imagine how badly those thresher teeth will hurt when they rip through a calf. He can't quite mark how it doubles him in size—more than that, probably, because he's never been this close before—or how this monster is elephantine, hide thicker than most bullets can manage. He does not focus on that ridiculous ritual blade behind a shoulder. He'd rather not notice that the shoulder itself looks more like granite block than tissue. He does not wonder what Disciplines a freak-of-fucking nature like this might hurl. He does not even ponder the possibility that Jeanette Voerman sent him waltzing into a deathtrap. Not right now.

Sometimes you just have to run.

And he does. The Brujah scrambles up, tearing for the doorway, throwing himself forward in a wolf-lunge. Nails slash through the back of his coat, seeking skin. _Rip!_ —but they don't get it yet. Celerity thrums from Nines's ankle-to-knee-to-hip, tickling his shinbones. He slams the heavy door behind him as an afterthought, and as the Anarch runs, it blows off those squeaky hinges— _passes him_. That thing was solid iron. It must have weighed two-hundred pounds. It flies over his head like a bandage torn off and tossed away.

Excuse him, please, but holy fuck.

When the tunnel turns sharp ahead, his speed puts him airborne with little effort, boot soles scraping the brick siding. And now it's _one_ , _two_ , _five_ — _fifteen_ — _thirty-five_ —steps down the warren wall, unhindered by water or sludge. Kicking off horizontal picks up the Brujah's momentum considerably. When he comes back down, landing in water to his knees with a splash, Nines moves for the first weapon at hand; he tears Eagle One from its holster and twists an arm back, emptying every round. He does not stop running.

Beyond the adrenaline, the gunfire, and the wind-howl through the tubes, he can still hear that monster rumbling for him. Maybe the bullets hit. Who the fuck can tell? It is only a dreaded dark shape stampeding down the channel behind him, loping, a thunderstorm in animal form. He wants to scream again, but fear has jammed his throat up sharp.

With one hand, Nines pulls out and fires the extra pistol he'd tucked away last night. His opposite rips a clip from his belt, pins it on his thigh, and bounces the depleted handgun full. He drops the now exhausted spare. _'Damsel's,'_ occurs to him with a start, as it flips grip-over-muzzle then vanishes in a silvery splash. The he pulls Eagle Two from his coat and he spins around—because what the fuck does he have to lose at this point?—and unloads seventeen FMJ rounds where he imagines that bastard's head to be. The nine millimeter was useless. The fifties might've hit. Something like blood and tallow flies though damp air. It's all moving too fast to tell.

There is an unforgettable yowl that comes down this derelict tunnel. There is a series of bony sounds the human ear cannot define—a strange, otherworldly _shift_.

It has pounced before the Baron can be sure of what he sees.

These shadows have transmogrified; the impact comes so fast, it does not register. Limbs, chitin, pelt, cruor, _cold_. Concrete breaks behind his eardrums. It's like a thunderclap. There is rushing—Nines knows it cannot be blood.

He could've been struck by a train.

Ground knocked from beneath him. He does not know what happened—swear-to-god-honest-to-goodness—but suddenly it's not Sheriff Los Angeles—it's not ceremonial sword or five-hundred-pound punch. Now, there is a great big motherfucking _bat_ over him—fur dripping, wings beating his eyes black, talons shredding the denim and flesh of his legs into streamers. It plows Nines flat. The Brujah is thrown backwards, a messy semi-flight carrying them both down the sewer; he is pinned down, and he is wounded; badly. Forelimbs pummel. Something snaps inside his torso. Three somethings. His head plunges beneath the water, skull cracking as it smacks the cement, spoiled rain flooding his lungs. Everything tastes like dirt. He screams bubbles. His eyes are wide open. Claws are raking through the muscle over his heart without resistance. It feels like a half-ton of marauder is crushing him into the earth. He sees up through the surface, a hundred—a thousand miles away in two feet of fetid ocean coast and spent storms—the beast overhead. It is a devastating, tremendous blur of hide and enamel and keratin and death.

He could swear he's sinking but he can't be, it's fucking impossible—there's mortar at his back, a layer of titanium—he does not have any more room. No, she said. Not heights. _Falling_.

White horror—frenzy pushing at his seams—bursts through the Baron's vision, narrowing his field of sight, murky beneath the stream. The claws are tearing forward, menacing the bindings there; they catch something that shatters pain within him. The chaos makes things insane and quiet all at once. He can't seem to force it away; Celerity drains quickly under panic, like wasting disease. Every blow glanced off, or missed, or came away with useless fists of hair. He thrashes. Skeleton and vestigial organs pop together. He thinks his chest is about to collapse.

Plan B: Nines pries his hands away from those talons, gathers a knuckleful of Potence, and _rips_ five fingers through a waxy length of wing.

The membrane bleeds more than he thought it would. Droplets splatter every which way. Capillaries burst. An inhuman screech shudders through these conduits. The Anarch does not wait for retaliation; he crashes one knee into a soft square of bat underbelly, clawing for space. Another rip. He is holding delicate, pulpy strips of wing between digits that radiate blue. The creature flails, scrambling off him.

Nines breaks the surface, teeth stretching past his bottom lip, gasping though he does not need to. He thrusts his upper body out of the ditch and himself upright. They retreat from each other for a moment to recover. Tiny abrasions knit together, but it is not enough; this damage is supernatural, and has been done.

The Brujah shakes. His guns are wet; he does not know how many ribs he's broken. Probably all of them—but one particularly troublesome floater is sticking into a lung. He wheezes red through nose and mouth. Small bite-marks sting all up and down his forearms. They are horribly painful, the burn of five dozen pins where that serrated mouth closed. It can't be felt right now. He gropes to hold his guts in, positive they have been exposed, surprised that the yawning slashes from sternum to navel already hurt this badly. No intestines poking through, somehow. But the lacerations are vicious and raw, dripping oil-black, tapping into the deep vessels, gouges that gash inches into him. This old Baron cannot tell where his blood ends and the Sheriff's begins, crimson plastered over both of them, mixing with water, soaked down to the bone. He can feel stickiness at the base of his neck. He isn't sure if it's mud or the insides of his head dribbling out.

Though he knows this will not work, Rodriguez jams a cartridge into his handgun and fires. The hammer releases a moist, impotent _snick_.

_Snick. Snick. Snicksnicksnick._

Sheriff Los Angeles hisses at him—he's a whipped, limping warform with a broken wingspan now. Bullet bits are pushing out of mending chiropteran muscle. Brown hair quivers over gamey tendons. Blind, beady button-eyes glint deep in its face, like a child's toy. Long, tapering ears twitch—ears that Nines thinks about pulling off. His own blood coats the Sheriff's paws. He's snapped the cartilage of its second wing-finger. Crumpled bones flap uselessly.

If Rodriguez can find a manhole, perhaps throwing himself into the city streets might save him. The Anarch is spattered in scarlet and obviously injured, but he appears human. This giant can't follow him out there, and—let's be honest—it isn't as if he's too concerned brushing up on the Masquerade might earn a Princely slap on the wrist. Fleeing is only a temporary solution, but what else? There is no guarantee a Camarilla sharpshooter won't claim a nice hunk of his brains the instant after. There is no promise he can make.

Nines drops the clips from his weapons and drops them both back into their holsters.

He is as ready for this as anyone can be.

There is a sawed-off strapped to the Brujah's back tonight, an extra protection that gouged deeply into his spine when the Nagloper swooped upon him. Its barrel pours water. Still, when Rodriguez hefts the gun, there is recognition in Sheriff LA's dull, circular eyes; sensitive lobes can hear him split it over a knee.

You like Vicissitude?

Try this on for Fleshcraft.

Rodriguez loses the water as best as Celerity allows him, pulls a bright green slug from his pocket, slams it down the barrel and fires.

The result is not a _snick_ this time.

Buckshot erupts.

Pieces of it ricochet and bite the Anarch at this close range, blowing chunks of meat off that fucking bat-beast, fur puffing into midair like a Saturday morning cartoon. Blood sprays. Rodriguez learned something about the havoc well-applied phosphorus can cause from their little Leopold episode on Santa Monica Pier; with the holes in his gut still oozing, he'd beelined to Gabe's specialty shop and ordered as many Frag-12 rounds as the ghoul could smuggle. Only way _that_ sort of pain would ever happen around Nines again was if he dealt the shot. Explosive ordinance at short-range isn't a conservative idea—if the Brujah wasn't drenched, he'dve probably caught fire—but sometimes you got to take a chance. The sound itself is impressive, dinging down ramshackle wardens, making rodents scurry everywhere. Baron LA can remember those bygone days when he used to cart a grenade around, for threats as much as practical use; a slug is much subtler. Until it goes off, anyway.

He does not wait to survey the damage. It screams. That's enough for him. The blast-force kicks the shooter backwards, and satisfied with that blood-curdling shriek, Nines turns tail and runs.

He hasn't escaped the blow-out one-hundred-percent clean. Embers have singed down the front of his jacket. Bits of smoldered flesh cling to it, charcoal grat—the fuck knows whose at this point? His shoulder does seem to be smoking, Rodriguez notes, tearing around another bend and swatting it out. Sidewalk squares fly under his footsteps. LaCroix's Sheriff is lagging on the rebound—considering an alternate attack-style, maybe, now that his adversary's equipped with heavy ordinance. He hadn't packed any extra hot rounds; fortunately, like that lone grenade, sometimes illusion is more powerful than reality. Nines is nevertheless a little upset at his past self. But he's not telling. Another five frantic yards, and slimy corridors reveal a boon, anyway: one large concrete hurtle jutting out from the wall.

The Anarch takes cover behind this meter outcropping, thankful for the slab of cool concrete at his back, smearing blood all up and down his makeshift trench. Trembling hands load the Mossberg with punishing steel. Valves whir and buzz overhead. It's getting hard to think straight, temples pounding, energy reserves burned low. He wonders if this was the last thing London saw before she died—if the Prince sicced his Frankenstein on his Childe, if he even waited until they could get her up on that stage. How many people have died like they were going to? You couldn't know; Nines couldn't even know if these questions were relevant, if that was really how it panned out for Woeburne. He doesn't know if he'd be able to sustain Celerity much longer. Maintaining multiple Disciplines has worn him out, making his body feel slight and stringy. Be nice if that raccoon wandered by right about now, but sometimes you just can't win. Rodriguez notes the way his kidneys are still cozy inside him and decides that Celerity will be the last to go.

He will not survive if it catches him again; that is a certain, terrible thing.

There are no footsteps scurrying down the aqueduct after him. There are no wing-beats. Quiet disturbs Nines far more than steam and sloshing water; he can hear the sound of his pulse, nerves whacking down his jaw. It's powerfully sore. He thinks he dislocated it somewhere back there. He does not look much like Nines anymore, to be honest, himself corroded away with Final Death nudging his fight-or-flight. Blood drips from distended canines and nose and bottom lip and what seems to be the Brujah's left ear. It leaks from sable hair in diluted rivulets; he's not certain where the cut is. His arms are shaking too badly to find a mark. That last shot must've smarted like hell, but the Sheriff is alive, a circling shark; Rodriguez is absolutely sure of this. The next assault will end him, most likely. He is not galloping out with blazing pistols like a moron. No god damned way. Let that mangy motherfucker come hurtling up here.

He chambers the shotgun and spits.

 _Kitty-kitty_ , Nines says, and is immediately embarrassed for doing it, like there was a poor kid down here to see.

There is an answering howl.

The marauder's charge is a terrifying, hairy blur. Tunnels grumble. Muck-stained waves crash forward. And—roundabout the time he has committed himself to ramming his silver vambrace as far down that demon's gullet as possible, watching the arm wrenched from its socket, taking a last bitter victory by rending Sheriff LA's throat apart from the inside—Nines Rodriguez gets a better idea.

He hefts the Mossberg and stands up. He aims at the ceiling.

There is a large water main welded to the side of this passageway. It was bronze at one point, but rust is eating it a concerning green. Industrial screws hold the cylinder segments together, aged into their foundations. It probably supplied the street; a rupture wouldn't flood the sewer, but it would burst, and do so until sanitation teams rushed down to caulk the overworn metal shut. Alone, totally mundane—a bit of rigging in a maze of similar tubes. There's nothing spectacular here.

Above it—at what would normally be a safe distance, Nines imagines—runs a rubber-coated band of wire, the source of these safety lights and underground generators. It is water-proof and completely dry. Iron bars line the exterior, keeping every inch in place; the voltage isn't high, but still. Crossing routes can be a disaster. That's true for just about everything you can build.

Two shots are all he has time for, a Nagloper warform careening forward with claws extended, but he usually doesn't need more than that.

One slams into the pipe, splinters it. There's a frigid, punitive jet out.

The next, though—and this is the important one—sails north, breaks apart, and brings a live power cable swinging at that copper main.

The water isn't freezing anymore.

A feather-light touch of cord superheats the tubes in a heartbeat. Metal boils, crackles, and glows a ferocious orange. Rust sears off. Steam instantly bloats the humid air. The watercourse chugging inside might as well have turned to lava.

Sheriff Los Angeles is roundabout under it when this happens.

It is hard to say if the scream is louder than the water.

Nines could've choked at the smell. A putrid chemical scent like scorched leather, charred fur, roasted proteins and smelted marrow. Smoke, black and animal, rose. Hot water kept rushing from the ruined pipeline, and he darted around it, avoiding burns by a wide-berth. He wasn't going in. He just had to see.

There in the steam: Sheriff LA.

He is a baked, crusted shell. Scabs bubble upon the mammalian back. Its legs are curled and crisped, its eyelids welted shut. It whimpers pitiably—or maybe that was just the wheeze of splitting, overheated meat. The bat had no nose left—only a white, sterile, pagan point of skull.

Nines reloads the shotgun, rams it into the blackness of that open, wagging mouth, and fires. _Bang. Chthuk-thuk. Bang._

He empties the barrel—four shots in total. He sees the mess, but it does not register. Not until the marauder's head is splinters and then pulp and then fine, sifting ash that dissolves in this lukewarm sewage and disappears.

He drops the Mossberg, thinks about puking, and hears Bertram Tung's voice hoot out behind him. Nines cannot quite make out his face, that carnival caricature of humanness; his vision blurs and swirls and throbs bright-to-black. Everything is twanging and spinning in strange ways. There seems to be a tilt to this floor; his knees won't line up right. And, even though the Baron stares straight ahead—deadly, desperately straight-ahead; eyes blue through the blood running through them—none of these shapes will stay still. But he can trace the distorted silhouette. He can pick out the footsteps. And he can hear, albeit dully, that voice.

" _Holy shit,"_ it says. _"See something new every day."_

" _Got your number, Rodriguez,"_ it says.

" _You are fucked,"_ it says.

Nines slogs out of the water, gestures wordlessly down the black tunnel behind him, and then he does puke. He leans forward the moment Tung turns around, blackened crisp of corpse behind him, shirt sopping with rainfall and steam, and he spits out whatever is left in his stomach. It's almost dry heaves. It feels like death and sleep and cracked rib bones.

The water turns a dark shade of red.

 

**III.**

 

There is dissent in downtown Los Angeles tonight.

She did her best to control it, the Ventrue officer standing stark center stage. Her chin was set stiff and respectable, posture appropriate for a Kindred much older than she. The suit across her racked shoulders was smart, impeccable black. An authoritative cough attempted to silence the theater. It wasn't a successful attempt, of course; wizened drones are never likely to heed commands from young, impatient bees. Perhaps with another thirty years, she would have commanded more esteem. Or, perhaps, the name LaCroix was enough. It does not much matter for tonight.

Respect is no part of what happens in Los Angeles tonight.

I understand, she said.

"Please. I understand you have questions. I don't have all the answers. And I know that this news comes at an uneasy time," Seneschal Woeburne pressed, standing straight-backed before Nocturne Theatre's muttering court, her hands gripping the podium as though it might escape. "But that is the way of it. Know that Mr. LaCroix appreciates your efforts in making this city a safe Domain. Know that I, personally, appreciate your prompt response to my call tonight. And above all, you should know your Prince promises that, whatever happens, he will see justice done."

They stared at her.

"I will notify you of any future developments. Until then, consider this Hunt official. Thank you," Ms. Woeburne said, bowed her head, and left the floor with few explanations and that numb expression walled-off by dark hair.

The crowd was a haze of murmurs and burrs.

The Seneschal stepped backwards, whitewashed by these lights, and felt as though she really did understand everything. Finally, after all.


	94. The Red Door

Dear Ms. Woeburne,

 

I hope you will forgive me the hand-delivery of this message. It is unusual, but the likelihood of third-party meddling is one I cannot permit. 

I am writing to cordially welcome you to my home with the intention to discuss a matter I am certain you recognize is of grave import to your constituency. Though I am aware this is a politically inopportune time to request your attentions, it has been made increasingly apparent to me there is no other recourse but to ask. To ask you—if it is not too impolite to say.

Please come visit me in my private library for conversation and whatever hospitality I am able to offer a Seneschal in so disconcerting a time in our shared history. I will be in the house all evening on the sixteenth of December, at the usual address. Christmas decorations, among other things. You are invited to drop by at any time.

If you arrive to find there is no attending servant to formally present you, please invite yourself in. It is the room with the red door.

Your timely response is appreciated. I am sure you and I have a great deal to talk about.

Regards,

 

MAXIMILLIAN STRAUSS


	95. Witch-Child

_You taught me language; and my profit on't_   
_Is I know how to curse._   
_-Caliban_

* * *

 

Nines Rodriguez needed somewhere to hide.

Normally, this would not be such a serious problem. A contested Baron always keeps his list of contacts: sympathizers, powerful lip-service Anarchs, neutral parties, resentful Camarilla pawns who slipped Jacksons to the Cause when their bosses' backs were turned. These were not friends, but they were resources with corners to slink off into for a while. Usually they were enough.

This was not usually.

Nines ran through his options and drove as fast through Santa Monica, away from the heart of the city.

He couldn't set foot downtown again—not since Prince LaCroix announced what was, apparently, open season on his ass. The cellar in their old den stocked with blood reserves, comprehensive sewer system maps, useful telephone numbers, guns—they weren't worth thinking about. It was unlikely _The Last Round_ still stood. Soon as its residents ducked-and-covered, some Camarilla stooges had probably bussed over to strip the place down to its rafters. Chewing on that only made him angry, though. Nines did not have time to be angry tonight.

Hollywood had been the original plan, and Rodriguez was still debating showing up once the calamity settled down and this Hunt thing got resolved. But until then, there was no guarantee Isaac wouldn't welcome him in and sell him out. That neighborhood would be swarming with vampires, and even if Nines did take the risk of appealing to Abrams, there was no way Baron Hollywood would declare warfare on the Camarilla troopers. They'd smoke him out like a candlestick in a straw house. He would almost certainly have to fight his way through.

The Baron did not want to fight again. His face bled, muscle tissue knitting back together fiber-by-fiber, pain refusing to ebb away.

Rodriguez glanced at the CD-case glistening on his dashboard—twenty minutes worth of Bertram Tung's handiwork. Jeanette hadn't lied about that, at least.

Baron LA stayed just under the speed limit, hoping he wouldn't get pulled over. Nines had immediately kicked off his truck's plates after limping from those sewers and stuck a random junkyard pair on, but sitting here, blood drying into leather, still felt like death. He'd park it somewhere off-putting, possibly lead some would-be vigilantes astray. Even better—if he could find some way to swap this can with somebody else, it'd be a functional decoy. For now, his boot pressed heavily into the accelerator. It was difficult not flooring pedal-to-metal and roaring down I-10. For now, he had to keep calm.

Easier said than done, Nines thought bitterly, feeling disturbingly mortal as he chewed on his lip.

Baron LA was calmer now than he had been, at least, the result of exhaustion more so than deliberate effort. When his ears had stopped ringing and Rodriguez remembered how to walk straight, he'd climbed out of that sewer, limped to his parked car, and driven directly to Gabe Milam's. It was muscle memory—a habit trained by three years' investment in ammunition and defeatism. The grizzled ghoul with a blank slot for his eye could tell something was wrong. You could see it in the way Nines pushed through the door. Fill it up, he said, indiscriminately, pointing to the bed of his truck outside— _everything that'll fit_. He didn't even bother counting. He threw a satchel of money onto Gabe's desk when the dealer began to protest _this was none of his business_ , the rest of the disaster-plan cash Baron LA had kept from Nicky Shih. Then he'd gone out, and he'd started throwing crates into the flatbed, and eventually he just slumped over, back pressing into the truck door. He banged a fist against the fender, pointless frustration. He said do not fucking ask.

Being back on the move again made Nines feel a little more secure. He could hear bullets cartons bouncing behind him, and knew exactly where a weapons cache was waiting at the foot of that mountain road. There was a metal taste in his mouth and fog of pain everywhere else, but the shock had since settled into taut, lethal focus. He could not go to pieces in Los Angeles tonight. He had to figure it out.

The beachfront could still fit the bill. Voerman had warned him off her turf earlier, sharing Therese's suspicions, but shoving a shotgun down a Sheriff's throat helped to put some perspective on things. Prince-Junior did not scare him anymore, if she ever had. Jeanette was not exactly low-key, but kept a list of clients, sometimes-partners, collaborators, and casual allies longer than his was. She also had motivation to help him—then again, Rodriguez wasn't sure she had the guts for it.

Finally, there was Griffith Park—because there was always Griffith Park.

The finality of C4 bundles and M16s was apparent. But Nines did not know if he would ever really be prepared. He had always thought there would be somebody with him.

He swiped the phone off his passenger seat, knocking aside a drained plastic blood pouch, and wedged it under one ear.

"Stay on the line. Look, I'm sorry for calling again," the Anarch preambled, tone more sedate than he'd been before. It might have been blood loss and it might have been the perspective of knowing Sheriff LA was dead. "But you were right. Bertram came through. He got me what I wanted, and I need your help now."

The voice that answered was undoubtedly Voerman's, but it was also unusually hard to recognize. Anxiety had tightened up that evil little lisp. To him, a libertine's misgivings were more frightening than slugs punching through the metal siding of his door. Their damage was more long-term.

_"You're still around!"_ she exclaimed, no attempt to douse the surprise. _"Not that I doubted your fight-or-flight, sweetie, but_ _shit_ _! I didn't think you'd be hanging here in Cali_ — _or the realm of us living fools_ — _for another chat."_ There was a drop in her pitch as astonishment became cautionary and grave. _"You've, um. Been enlightened as to your current legal pickle, right, sunshine?"_

"Like you wouldn't believe," the Baron chuffed. He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror—black hair stiff and crusted with red, one silver eye swollen purple, hands pale. The knees had been shredded bloodily out of his pants. There were bat toothmarks puncturing both sleeves of his coat; though the flesh beneath had healed, these holes remained. The Anarch winced. He looked like a dying thing.

" _Wull... this is just a great big tragedy, it is. I don't know what more you think I can do for you, babe. I am only one little girl. Bertram says he's never setting foot near you again after tonight; whatever the hell you did to scare him off, I can't say, but things got hairy here on our beachfront paradise real quick after we talked. I'm sticking my hand on the hotplate just by picking up this phone. You're not exactly everyone's favorite Brujah at the moment, Ninesy."_

"No shit," Nines barked, and the madness of it all—of this fox run through Los Angeles; the cat's cradle that was a two-year tug-of-war with her Seneschal; this show-starved jackal princess talking as though they were guerilla generals, comrades-in-resistance—made him choke into a laugh. Sober, grueling humor. These were absurd nights. "Jeanette, I need you to do something for me. You can stay where you are. But I have to get underground within the next hour—at the absolute fucking latest—or I have a strong feeling neither one of us will be worrying about the Prince any longer." A crank of the wheel wrapped his car onto Main Street. "I am carrying a very sensitive package."

There was hesitation over the line; it clenched Rodriguez's gut. What felt like anger at the Voermans still tasted like fear to him, though: a cold, sour pang. His back teeth began to hurt.

" _How sensitive are we talking about here, babe?"_

"The kind of sensitive that will blow that Board or that tower sky-high— _if_ I can hold onto it." (A real big "if.") "I can't talk about it over the phone. Find somewhere safe for me, and I'll let you in." Second part of this excuse was a lie. He'd make something interesting up if Voerman bit.

An unfortunate pause.

" _I can't, Ninesy,"_ she sighed, a dramatic, sob-story puff. _"I just can't."_

"Yes, Jeanette. You _can_ ," the Brujah insisted. Tung's disk rattled as his truck blew through a stoplight, horns spitting behind him. An empty casing rolled about beneath the seats. "And you _will_."

There was irritation in her titter-back. _"I don't think you're hearing me, buddy. Because you aren't being a very good listener. You can't come to Santa Monica again_ — _not any time soon. Your kind is not welcome here anymore."_

"I know you sure as hell aren't turning your back on me, darlin. I know you are not backing out of our arrangement two minutes from midnight. Because I have been nothing but straight in my dealings with you," Rodriguez snarled. His fingers began to sink hard into the wheel covering, rings denting deep, knuckles swollen around them. "And you should realize, this late in the scheme of things, that if I bite it, the Free-State folds. And that means that _you_ fold, Jeanette. But fuck that, I see. You're not concerned. If you think you can dig yourself out of this shit-hole alone, be my fucking guest. Give it your best shot. Bet your sister will torch you before LaCroix's goons catch me."

Maybe it intimidated her; maybe that psychotic bitch was speaking the gospel truth. Either way, she said no. He drove fast to nowhere. _"I hope you're not implying I'm getting off on seeing you squirm, Ninesy!"_ Junior cried, theatrical, sounding offended. _"Breaks my heart to see what's happened to you. And here you go threatening me! Oh, I just can't stand all of this drama."_

"This is not drama. If you don't stop screwing around," the Anarch chomped out, hackles flaring, "I will see to it that you—"

" _What, sunrise? End up like Nicky Shih?"_

The old Baron fell silent.

" _You always do assume the worst in people, don't you? Believe me when I say it's not that I don't want to help you. I don't care if you DID destroy him, sweetness. He was probably a haughty bitch, just like the rest of them."_ There was a harrumph, followed by a darker frown. _"But I am more than a little pressed this fine eve, myself."_

"Voerman. Jeanette. What could you _possibly_ be handling worse-off than—"

In that instant, her baits and snags dropped. _"It's Therese,"_ Jeanette said, and she was absolutely serious. _"She's acting like real nutter-butter. And when I say that,"_ Junior continued, nose wrinkling, voice going spiteful and thick, full of hatred and fright in equal measures. _"I mean Sissy's raving crazy since that meeting ended, even by her standards. You want to know where the hell I am at the moment, bad boy? I am locked in my own fucking bathroom. She came storming in here maybe twenty minutes ago, screaming some nonsense, railing on and on about God-Only-Knows. Broke my mirror! Turned it right over! I'm afraid to come out. For all I know, my poor city's crawling with Cam right now."_ There was silence for a moment, stifled breathing across the telephone. She pressed a hand over it, sitting sullenly in cold porcelain, laptop on crunched knees in an empty bathtub. He couldn't see that half the Malkavian's hair had been ripped down; that her own bracelet prints were whipped into a soft cheek. He couldn't see her shoe was lost, or that her shirt was splashed with ink, a glass of B-positive, whatever had been lying around Therese's office space. He could hear the seeds of underlying panic. _"I am not playing games with you, Nines Rodriguez. Things are happening fast. I don't know what went down at Venture after Nocturne let out. But it scares the bejeezus out of me. Had Bertie flash all my tech. Burned my diary up, even._ She _said she'd burn me in my sheets!"_ She did not ask for a rescue. She knew better than that. _"I think she suspects something's up between us, honey-bee. I think she's got it in her head I had something to do with the Bergamot deal and Nicky Shih. And that could make things very, very bad for me."_

Very bad for a multitude of LA vampires, Rodriguez knew—but worst for him, Jeanette, and little old London.

This was really the only reaction that fit. "Fuck," Nines cursed. He slammed a palm onto the wheel. "How the fuck did she find out? Who the fuck would have known you and me talked?"

" _Like I said, sweet thing, I don't know. It's like she was anticipating it_ — _grew eyes in the back of her head, or something. Or in all the streetlights."_

Nines rumbled, because it can't be anyone else; it _has_ to be "Woeburne."

Her duplicity—as a Ventrue and as an integral part of Rodriguez's Santa Monica schemes—was not a shock. Working with London always made Baron LA nervous as all hell. He had assumed, however, that their role in the Shih affair would prevent her from over-sharing about this. Woeburne was a snake and he knew so going in; you don't invite snakes into your home without packing shotguns and medicine, because sure as they've got fangs, they are going to bite you. It's only a matter of time and how fast you move. He wasn't sure how she managed to implicate him while covering her tracks—wasn't even sure if the Seneschal had, in fact, succeeded in this, because maybe that snake was sitting somewhere in a dank Camarilla cell right now. Did she hate him enough to throw her life away? It didn't sound like London. But if she had goose-stepped over to Nocturne Theatre, called for his death, and then turned video into Therese Voerman's hands…

Nines snatched the CD, jiggled case-and-all into an envelope, and wedged it into a corner of dashboard compartment. It is only a piece of plastic. But even will a full trunk, this is the last real bullet he has.

" _It Girl LaCroix announced the Blood Hunt on you,"_ Jeanette informed him, as though she'd had taken a quick peek into the Baron's running list of regrets and glimpsed too much hairspray, cavalry boots, and that upturned nose. _"Besides the whole law-and-order speech, she didn't tell us anything particularly illuminating. Prince was a no-show. Must've been oh-so-busy, no time to entreat the peons. Buttercup seemed in a hurry to get back to her papa's side."_

Nines does not take this personally anymore. This is how the game works. This is what interaction becomes. He doesn't hold it against London to try her damndest to shoot him down. He didn't expect her to accomplish this goal, but he doesn't hate her any more or any less.

That does not mean he isn't going to wrap his hands around the Ventrue's throat and squeeze until that snake bubbles blood.

Later.

For now, the Baron had to maneuver around her return-fire. Or maybe this was Woeburne's dirty backup plan all along.

For all that snakery, she hadn't been wrong. He was lugging a nuke in his pocket, but the Baron needed high ground. He needed to get to the top of the hill.

Better the devil you know.

Hollywood it was.

Nines veered away from Santa Monica, hung up on Jeanette, and dialed the offices of Isaac Abrams.

 

**II.**

 

Three Toreador sat quietly in the Baron's lobby.

The typical swank, upmarket air of Golden Age Jewelry had been pulled out by its roots tonight. Dim, anxious understatement replaced it—turned it all to a soberness that brought this family crowding together here. None of them spoke. Burnished turquoise gems spun on the lampshades. Cherrywood lost its gloss. A few needles dropped off the bonsai trees; the amber light flattened Edward Hopper into single dimensions; decorative mirrors reflected little. The ashtrays were immaculate. Diamonds tinkled in glass cases. There was a record player standing open on the coffee table—a real antique. The room was wheezing on its own weight.

Isaac sat in the desk chair and looked his Childer—son and daughter, both.

It was rare to see them hunched side-by-side here, sharing elbowroom in his couch. He enjoyed the novelty. Generally, Ash only communicated with him through messages relayed by Velvet, and Isaac rarely received responses. Theirs was a sorry grudge, but one that worked well enough. The boy's resentment was so pervasive and predictable that it enabled his Sire to control him. It made manipulation look like accidents, made management look like leaked information. A little reverse psychology, you could say. But a direct meeting was unusual—it occurred only by necessity these nights, and even then, never without the backdrop of antipathy. If anything indicated emergency in Los Angeles, this was it.

Isaac looked at his Childer, and wondered how long it would take LaCroix to guillotine him, too.

Ash and Velvet were huddled thigh-to-thigh on the office couch, sutured together despite how they sometimes bickered. He was reliably petulant, slumped onto one side of sofa arm, rejecting eye contact. She appeared edgy and agitated, azalea hair sullen and straight, palms pressed on the knees of her blue hobble skirt. They were everything wrong with the industry now. Whatever class they had was overridden by grunge and by skin.

Isaac looked at them with concern that was not devoid of a certain atavism.

Baron Abrams had collected his Childer directly from the congregation in Nocturne. There was no argument this time. The danger-state was clear. If LaCroix was preparing for an organized move against the downtown Anarchs (executing Rodriguez suggested little else), Hollywood would be next on his list, one way or another—bargain or siege. They needed to regroup, to consider their options. This was not a time to make wakes. He understood the Hunt on Baron LA as the example it was meant to be.

"I think, if we don't hear anything in another half-hour, I ought to put out a few calls," Velvet suggested. She still had honey in her nervous voice, but not much. Long, painted fingers were poking into corset buttons. "I have ghouls living downtown that could bring us up-to-date on what the streets look like right now."

Abrams waved her off, flicking the headlight of a tiny Model-T. Five automobiles sat on his cramped desk in miniature. He rearranged the figurines in an assembly-line file, wheels stacking across mug prints and wood-stain. "That's not a good idea. I have plenty of my own agents for that, and I'll tell you: I am not moving a muscle over there. Think it through. If LaCroix's mooks get one of your people in a vise, he could drop a dozen spying accusations on you—and, by association, all of us." The Baron flashed her an austere, wrinkled look. "And then we'll know exactly what those streets look like, because they'll flood into Hollywood. Don't believe for a second they won't. We can't afford to put anything beyond that two-bit baby-faced Prince tonight."

VV's face paled a few notches, but she was not about to argue with her benefactor. Ash didn't care.

"You can worry about your contacts later," the Baron warned. "For now, my main goal is to keep the both of you out of trouble."

Ash snorted—a sick, bastardized sound. "I'll bet."

He clicked a lighter, took one drag, and thunked his head into the sofa back to blow a mouthful of smoke at the fire alarm. It wasn't very long before Velvet snatched the cigarette out of her brother's fingers and snapped it, leaving him to stew on cold air.

"You know I can't stand the smell," she murmured. But VV knew exactly what her gesture had done.

They hated being around Isaac like this, because proximity to the old, brandied Baron made whatever love these siblings felt twist into competition. Neither meant to hurt the other, but sibling rivalry is what it is. VV strove for warmth to compensate for adoption, because she knew—for all his hateful words and brooding; for all her loyalty, honor and obedience—their patron loved her brother more. Ash did not want this affectionate narcissist anywhere near him, mind or body, but there was still that needle of blood-bond that made his approval absolutely vital to the Childe's sense of self. And they knew, worst of all, that seeing them squirm pleased him.

Velvet leant forward and shoved the cigarette into one of those spotless opal trays. Ash shrugged it off.

Isaac was about to ask about their hunter situation when the telephone rang.

When he answered to Nines Rodriguez's voice, the Toreador—who was normally so self-assured, so blasé in his Domain—hit 'speaker.'

"Am I surprised to hear from you," Abrams remarked, bushy eyebrows scaling his brow, standing from the cushioned chair. The feeling was genuine. Both Childer fidgeted in their loveseat. "We were waiting for word from the Ventrue, or for someone to tell us they'd shot you. What's your situation—did you make it out of the city?"

The connection was full of static, hard to make out; it sounded as though he was speeding down badly-paved roads with windows open. The Brujah shouted. His fear was packaged up like urgency, but it wasn't difficult to see through. Every bump made the signal cough and lose a word. _"No, I_ — _not yet_ — _had some shit to take care of. Listen, I need something from you. I'm_ — _OK. Have a few people_ — _San Fran_ — _on the way. Don't know when. Maybe in a few nights. But I_ — _wait that long."_

"If your plan is to stay around LA waiting for backup, Nines, I doubt you'll still be here whenever they arrive."

A single, unfunny laugh barked through the receiver. But there was nothing comical about either end of this conversation. _"_ — _telling me,"_ Abrams made out. It seemed as though feedback from his neighbor had put Rodriguez at greater ease, for all his frayed nerves—relieved him, even—in the way that sharing secrets does. Baron Hollywood frowned. This was not an encouraging thing to hear from a belligerent, control-hungry Brujah who Isaac fully believed would someday rally against him as surely as he had decried Sebastian LaCroix. _"Motherfucker_ — _his Sheriff after me. Hell of a_ — _got away. Barely. Took a few bites out of me. But_ — _deep-throat a pump-action. Least that bastard is out of the picture."_

Ash puffed through his nose, semi-amused. "Son-of-a-bitch is hard to kill." Isaac shot him a stern glance, because Nines didn't need any more applause, or to know he was being projected to a full room.

"Word is you were caught red-handed in Santa Monica. What in the world were you thinking? Didn't you consider my stake in this mess? I don't expect you to consult me about every move your people make, but a hit against the Prince's own offices isn't exactly routine."

The Anarch chief was markedly less argumentative than usual, no energy left for bickering with his allies. _"Right. Yeah. Look. No time_ — _explain. Was worth_ — _got to get a load of this. Shit. I don't want to talk about it on the phone, but_ — _any other options_ —c _an't keep this to myself, Abrams. Camarilla finds out about_ — _down in the streets himself to burn me out. Someone has to know. You have to hear this."_

"I'm listening," Abrams granted, hunkering over the desk, corners digging into his palms. VV and Ash dropped into silence. "Talk."

" _I broke into a Cam data morgue last night. Needed a pass to get in, which is_ — _waste that bitch. Had a lead on some call records locked up in there; it wasn't real clear, but I grabbed everything I could get my arms around. There's a_ — _cracked it, but_ — _hell of a lot more,"_ Nines swore, anxiety tightening his tone and teeth. The words crackled with interference. But Isaac made out enough. _"I'll run through this fast. From what I am able to understand, the Prince_ — _elect that Giovanni_ — _something about a sarc_ — _in to study it. Don't know anything else about that. Whatever it was freaked the fuck out of some very important people. Made the Sabbat go apeshit. Here's the_ — _lying son-of-a-bitch. These phone records. I can't read them. No transcripts. Probably didn't take_ — _cover his own ass. But this is not a fucking coincidence. There was that Tong hit on the_ — _killed that professor. You know who bankrolls the Tong."_ Absolutely. _"Seems normal that goddamn devil would try and_ — _LaCroix's plans. But these records. They_ — _call from a Venture Tower extension to_ — _Chinatown. Had Tung_ — _traced it to an office right outside that ugly-as-shit Golden Temple. The Red Dragon. One of Xiao's properties,"_ he hollered, spilling faster, head pounding, hardly able to relay it all. _"There's a lot of calls to this number two, three months ago. Then they stop dead. But right before that shooting_ — _Empire Hotel, it shows up again, then_ —right _fucking after, maybe five minute_ s— _to that Tower. What the fuck does that look like to you, Isaac? What does it look like?"_

The Toreador said nothing. He looked to his Childer—blinking quietly, boy and girl—reading the frightful way they stared back at him in desperation for guidance.

Baron Abrams winced. "Believe me. I'm not one to doubt the Prince's capacity to be a schemer. But even I have trouble wrapping my head around this. Why in the hell would LaCroix…?"

" _What does it matter?"_ Nines snapped, fumbling, up-in-arms from his account. Information overload—old furies and new conspiracies. The Brujah had wound up with too much firepower and no means to use it. _"I don't know why, but if_ — _is using the Kuei-jin for his own seat, this_ — _ruin him. We need to find a_ — _until the right time. Then we have to blast this shit full-force to every corner of the state. Maybe get Gary to do it. Even the Camarilla won't let that fly. See how the fucker likes_ — _for a Blood Hunt."_

"They'll kill us," Velvet whispered. Isaac's look alone couldn't have said _you read my mind_ , but. She was drained of all the colors she didn't plaster on, winding her own fingers for comfort. She held a breath she didn't need. "If you do this, Isaac—if Gary doesn't agree…"

His ahem was enough to cut her off.

"These are some volatile claims. I'd love nothing more to see LaCroix choke on his own plans, but I can't sell it to a council on your word. You are an exile since ten o'clock tonight, my friend. I can't do anything without evidence," the old Toreador pronounced—willing, able, but hands clean. Ash and VV did not snipe back and forth between one another. They did not whisper private messages from lip-to-ear behind cupped hands. They sat there, grim, grateful.

_"I have the records. All of it. Probably more, but I didn't_ — _time to figure out anything else,"_ Rodriguez told them, rushed, breathing through an open voice that kept breaking, snapped lines, a threat unraveling. It was the last big speech of the doomed Greek. His ink was fading quickly on the page. _"I can get it to you in Hollywood. If you can back me."_

Velvet grabbed for her sibling's hand. He did not extract it.

" _You have to back me."_

The Baron watched them both.

" _Isaac?"_ Nines asked.

He pushed one finger down on End.


End file.
